This report reviews the process of implementing the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) in South Africa. The aurthor of this report, Nobuntu Mbelle, finds that, though South Africa was anxious to complete the APRM self-assessment on time and did so successfully, its commitment to speed was perhaps at the expense of quality. Although there was an expectation that South Africa would set a high standard for the process, it fell some way short of this ambition. 

There were some innovative and important steps, including the decentralisation of the process and an effort to collect information from a very wide range of respondents. But lack of planning and over-hasty implementation meant that the APRM process was nothing like as thorough as it could have been; more worryingly, the hand of government was far too strong in the preparation of the final self-assessment report.

This report is part of a series of studies commissioned by the Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project (AfriMAP) of the Open Society network of foundations in Africa (which includes the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, OSISA, our partner in this report) to assess the APRM process in adhering countries.