The Advisory Gap: Why African Institutions Need Design Partners

Wilson Ugah — Retired U.S. Army Strategist | Founder, NOVA Strategic Advisory Group
Originally published July 22, 2026. Revised August 14, 2026.

Much international development assistance to African institutions still funds programs and projects more readily than the systems that allow those activities to endure. Donor financing has value, and African institutions possess agency, talent, and reform ambition. The gap is architectural. Ministries, delivery units, and agencies become more capable when decision rights, coordination routines, budget processes, and performance measures are deliberately designed and owned by the institution itself. Three recurring relationships help explain why that architecture is often missing. Donor incentives favor disbursement over slower institutional work. Recipient institutions can remain dependent when external support substitutes for internal capability. Advisory relationships are commonly organized around discrete technical tasks rather than sustained institutional design. A fourth dynamic cuts across all three. Better systems redistribute authority, discretion, and rents. Power therefore shapes whether they survive. Actors who benefit from ambiguity or weak coordination have reasons to resist them. A workable design-partnership model must address incentives, advisory structure, and political feasibility together.

Scope and a Caveat

Africa is not a single institutional case, and the diagnosis needs that caveat upfront. The 2024 Ibrahim Index of African Governance, covering fifty-four countries from 2014 to 2023, found that overall governance progress stalled after 2022 while trajectories diverged sharply. Just over half the continent’s population, in thirty-three of fifty-four countries, lived under improving governance. The rest lived under governance that had worsened over the decade.¹ The African Union’s Agenda 2063 likewise treats capable institutions and transformative leadership as continental priorities set by African governments themselves.² The advisory gap sits between that ambition and the project-centered architecture through which much external support still flows. It also varies by institution type. The problem is especially acute in bodies whose core function is to coordinate or execute across government. These include finance and planning ministries, delivery units, and continental institutions. Single-mandate regulators, state-owned enterprises, and subnational authorities require separate diagnosis because mandate, resources, politics, and design constraints vary by sector and jurisdiction.

Donor Incentives Reward Disbursement Over Design

Donor agencies operate under pressures that favor visible, timely disbursement over institutional work whose effects are slower and harder to measure. Recent African Development Bank reporting identifies procurement and implementation delays and capacity constraints in project implementation units among recurring factors affecting disbursement. An independent Bank evaluation likewise found that delayed or missing counterpart funding can impair project efficiency and effectiveness.³ Those field-level frictions become more consequential when slow disbursement is treated only as a delivery problem instead of a signal of capacity that may need to be built. This produces a structural bias. Unspent funds are easy to register as failure. A project, meanwhile, can disburse successfully without leaving behind a stronger institutional system.

The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness sought to correct this bias by committing donors to align support with recipient systems.⁴ Yet implementation exposed the limits of a bureaucratic remedy for a substantially political problem. Donor staff remained averse to the institutional and reputational risks of channeling support through recipient systems. Agency incentives also continued to reward speed and visibility over the slower work of strengthening how institutions function.⁵ Chandy’s proposed corrections therefore included changing those incentives and accepting greater institutional risk in exchange for stronger recipient systems.

Recipient Institutions Face Little Pressure to Build Internal Systems

When external funding renews through need rather than earned capacity, institutions have little incentive to build the systems that would reduce their dependence on it. Wangwe’s review of aid and technical assistance in Africa describes a related mechanism. Aid-funded technical assistance can replace indigenous expertise. Parallel aid structures can also draw public servants and senior officials into project machinery that erodes rather than builds government capacity. Wangwe characterizes much aid as more “capacity-utilizing” than “capacity-building.”⁶ This is one route into what the capability literature calls a capability trap. Institutions acquire the outward forms of functional systems without the underlying ability to perform.⁷ The related mechanism of isomorphic mimicry captures the same problem at the level of reform. Organizations adopt forms that signal capability and external legitimacy even when performance does not improve.⁷,⁸

One qualification matters. Mkandawire rejected claims that developmental states were impossible in Africa, pointing instead to African cases that combined developmental purpose, administrative capability, and sustained performance.⁹ A 2024 peer-reviewed study of Ethiopia’s execution-capacity-building program, read through Mkandawire’s framework, likewise contrasts donor-style “institutional monocropping” and “institutional monotasking” with a relational, context-specific, and political approach to building execution capability.¹⁰ The capability trap, then, is a pattern produced by incentives, relationships, and political conditions. It is not a fixed ceiling on African institutional competence. That distinction is central to the argument here. If capability can be built under some conditions, the strategic question becomes how external support can reinforce those conditions rather than substitute for them.

Advisory Relationships Favor Projects Over Institutional Design

A survey of more than nine hundred civil service officials across forty ministries, departments, and agencies in four African countries found that 85 percent of organizational units received development aid as technical assistance or as a mix of technical assistance and direct funding. External experts were a widespread component of that assistance. They included embedded advisers, project-based consultants, and donor-financed secondees.¹¹ Where support is organized around a discrete assignment, the advisor functions primarily as a project resource. The engagement can end with the assignment even when the institution still lacks the routines or systems needed to perform the function independently. Complementary research found that donor capacity-building efforts have tended to concentrate on national government ministries, particularly ministries of finance, while center-of-government functions that coordinate cross-cutting execution receive comparatively less attention.¹²

Mkandawire’s later work sharpens the problem beyond efficiency. He argued that the way donors have pressed policy prescriptions on African governments can foreclose the disagreement and deliberation through which domestic ownership develops.¹³ A project-based advisory relationship organized around an external expert’s judgment of best practice can reproduce that foreclosure. Where negotiation is absent from the design, an engagement may deliver a technically sound product without generating the locally negotiated legitimacy that durable institutional change often requires.

The Objection: Power and Political Incentives

The strongest objection to design partnership is that it can be too polite about power. Mushtaq Khan’s political settlements framework holds that technical design alone cannot explain institutional performance. The distribution of power among organized interests helps determine how institutions actually work.¹⁴ Ambiguity, discretion, and weak coordination can therefore persist when they serve officials or networks with enough power to defend them. Khan argues that reforms threatening the rents of powerful organizations invite strong contestation and may be reversed, modified, or distorted.¹⁵

Two decades of UK governance programming in Nigeria bring that objection directly into the donor–institution relationship at issue here. Through the State and Local Government Programme (SLGP), the State Partnership for Accountability, Responsiveness and Capability (SPARC), the State Accountability and Voice Initiative (SAVI), and the Partnership to Engage, Reform and Learn (PERL), British support worked with Nigerian state governments and non-state actors on public financial management, public-sector management, policy, planning, and accountability.¹⁶ Yet DFID Nigeria’s own Drivers of Change work questioned the prevailing orthodoxy of pursuing state reform through technical assistance and capacity building. Its analysis located reform within wider power relations. It judged generic capacity building insufficient to generate significant change and argued that development practice itself had to adapt. A later retrospective found that SPARC, SAVI, and PERL incorporated politically informed approaches while retaining traditional technical assistance and capacity development. Even so, they could not directly challenge elite vested interests in maintaining the status quo.¹⁷

The SPARC experience makes the design problem concrete. Evaluators found a recurring tension between locally determined problems and reversion to a limited menu of standardized technical interventions. They also found that a technical-assistance-led model could constrain ownership when governments were offered tools too complex for existing capacity. SPARC increasingly responded by embedding reform in government structures, using context-specific tools, and emphasizing locally developed design, political analysis, coalition building, coaching, and day-to-day partnership.¹⁸

This objection should be conceded rather than answered away. The Nigeria evidence shows why design partnership cannot simply become a more sophisticated form of technical assistance. Politics enters before the tool. It shapes which problems can be named, which reforms attract sponsorship, which interests can block implementation, and how much change an institution can absorb. The capability-trap literature cited above points toward a response consistent with Khan’s framework. Problem-driven iterative adaptation begins with locally nominated problems, tests politically feasible steps, and expands as capability and legitimacy accumulate. A design partner who arrives with a comprehensive architecture on day one risks reproducing the failure mode the Nigeria programs themselves learned to avoid. A partner who begins with what a reform-minded coalition can actually carry has a better chance of surviving resistance and building ownership. Political feasibility, sequencing, and adaptation therefore belong inside the design problem itself.

What a Design Partner Actually Does

Conventional technical assistance may draft a policy, train staff, or deliver a monitoring framework against a donor’s terms of reference. Those tasks can be useful, but institutional design requires a different discipline. The evidence assembled here points to six connected functions for a design partner. Each has at least partial precedent in current practice.

First, the partner helps define the performance problem the institution itself is trying to solve, consistent with PDIA’s emphasis on locally nominated problems rather than imported solutions.¹⁹ Second, the partner maps the institutional terrain. That includes mandates, budget flows, reporting lines, and informal veto points. Third, the partner helps design decision rights so coordination does not depend on personal relationships or crisis intervention. Fourth, the partner aligns resources with priorities by connecting plans to budgets, procurement cycles, and staffing timelines. Fifth, the partner builds a performance rhythm. African delivery units provide precedent by concentrating attention on a limited set of government priorities and subjecting them to routine tracking, review, and problem-solving.²⁰ Sixth, the partner designs exit and ownership from the outset. A named steward and transition date make that responsibility explicit. The institution then absorbs the method rather than renting the advisor’s capacity indefinitely.

Institutional design needs political backing to acquire force. In her first-person account of Nigeria’s debt-relief campaign, then-finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala describes President Olusegun Obasanjo making debt relief a personal and national priority, giving her an explicit mandate to deliver it, and assembling the economic team she led.²¹ Her account shows Nigerian-owned reforms, high-quality technical work, and political lobbying operating together at presidential and ministerial levels. The lesson for institutional design is straightforward. Expertise can organize reform. Political authority creates the space to carry it.

The African Capacity Building Foundation, an African Union specialized agency established in 1991 through a partnership of African governments and the donor community, provides a partial precedent through its Institutional Accelerator Model. The model covers capacity needs assessment, implementation of improvement plans, and advisory services. The same published framework describes a funding mix of member contributions, grants, training fees, and service-based revenue.²² The model reaches part of the design-partnership concept proposed here. Its published description does not specify decision-rights design, resource alignment, or exit design. Those additional functions would distinguish a fuller design-partnership approach.

Who Coordinates, and What the AU Case Actually Shows

A design-partnership model needs a standing coordination function inside the institution. Temporary project offices dissolve when grants close. The African Union’s reform process offers a useful, bounded example. The AU maintains an Office of Strategic Planning and Delivery, and responsibility for championing institutional reform passed from President Paul Kagame to President William Ruto in February 2024. The reform process therefore persisted beyond a change in political sponsorship.²³ The AU’s separate financing-levy episode shows the other half of the problem. The effort sought to fund the Union through a 0.2 percent levy on eligible imports. Formal adoption and institutional sponsorship did not eliminate member-state resistance.²⁴ The lesson is narrow. An institutional home can help preserve continuity across leadership change, but it cannot substitute for political consent. Treating continuity as proof of political feasibility would overstate what the AU case shows.

What This Requires

For donors, this means measuring agency and staff performance, at least in part, against evidence that recipient systems are stronger rather than disbursement volume alone. It also means accepting the sequencing that politically feasible institutional design requires instead of assuming comprehensive reform packages can be implemented as designed. For recipient institutions, it means appointing empowered internal owners with real political backing, protecting reform teams from routine political churn, and treating external support as a bridge to independent capability. For advisors, success lies in the institution’s ability to convene the right actors, make timely decisions, and sustain performance after the engagement ends.

Program funding and technical assistance remain necessary on their own terms. Design work is what converts funded activity into lasting capability. That work must account for entrenched interests from the start. The AU reform experience illustrates both the value of institutional continuity and the limits imposed by political resistance. Until donors and institutions treat institutional design as a distinct, fundable, and politically literate category of partnership, many African institutions will remain rich in projects and poor in systems. The advisory gap closes when the central question shifts from what can be funded to what the institution must still be able to do after the funding ends. It must also ask who has the standing to make that happen.

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Endnotes

1. Mo Ibrahim Foundation, “Launch of the 2024 Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) Report,” October 23, 2024, accessed July 18, 2026, https://mo.ibrahim.foundation/news/2024/launch-2024-ibrahim-index-african-governance-iiag-report. ←
2. African Union, “Goals & Priority Areas of Agenda 2063,” accessed July 18, 2026, https://au.int/en/agenda2063/goals. ←
3. African Development Bank Group, “Bank Group Operations through a High 5 Lens,” Annual Report 2023, June 20, 2024, accessed August 13, 2026, https://www.afdb.org/en/annual-report-and-financial-report-2023/bank-group-operations-through-high-5-lens; Independent Development Evaluation (IDEV), Evaluation of Counterpart Funding at the AfDB: Executive Summary (Abidjan: African Development Bank Group, 2024), 7, https://idev.afdb.org/sites/default/files/documents/files/Executive%20Summary_Counterpart%20Funding%20Evaluation%20at%20the%20AfDB.pdf. ←
4. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (Paris: OECD, 2005), 2–3. ←
5. Laurence Chandy, “It’s Complicated: The Challenge of Implementing the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, September 22, 2011), accessed July 18, 2026, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/its-complicated-the-challenge-of-implementing-the-paris-declaration-on-aid-effectiveness. ←
6. Samuel Wangwe, “Foreign Aid in Africa: Role, Experiences and Challenges,” background paper for the African Development Bank Conference, Tunis, November 22, 2006, 12–13. ←
7. Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews, “Capability Traps? The Mechanisms of Persistent Implementation Failure,” CGD Working Paper 234 (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, December 2010), 3–5. ←
8. Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock, “Escaping Capability Traps through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA),” CGD Working Paper 299 (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, June 2012), 5, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9403175. ←
9. Thandika Mkandawire, “Thinking about Developmental States in Africa,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 25, no. 3 (May 2001): 289–290, 309–310. ←
10. Eyob Balcha Gebremariam, “Thandika Mkandawire’s Model for an African Developmental State, and the Ethiopian Experiment (2001–2018),” Africa Development 49, no. 2 (2024): 28–29, 32, https://doi.org/10.57054/ad.v49i2.5712. ←
11. Biniam Bedasso, “Rethinking Technical Assistance: What 900 African Officials Told Us,” Center for Global Development, October 15, 2025, accessed July 18, 2026, https://www.cgdev.org/blog/rethinking-technical-assistance-what-900-african-officials-told-us. ←
12. Hannah Timmis, Lessons from Donor Support to Technical Assistance Programmes, K4D Helpdesk Report (Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, January 15, 2018), 7–8. ←
13. Thandika Mkandawire, “Aid, Accountability, and Democracy in Africa,” Social Research 77, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 1149–1182, at 1161. ←
14. Mushtaq H. Khan, “Political Settlements and the Analysis of Institutions,” African Affairs 117, no. 469 (October 2018): 638, 647. ←
15. Khan, “Political Settlements and the Analysis of Institutions,” 639. ←
16. Laure-Hélène Piron et al., Twenty Years of UK Governance Programmes in Nigeria: Achievements, Challenges, Lessons and Implications for Future Support (London: ODI, October 2021), 28–31, https://odi.org/documents/7958/Flagship_UK_Governance_Programming_in_Nigeria__final_corrected.pdf. ←
17. Piron et al., Twenty Years of UK Governance Programmes in Nigeria, 63. ←
18. Victoria Chambers, Clare Cummings, and Hamish Nixon, Case Study: State Partnership for Accountability, Responsiveness and Capability (London: ODI, February 2015), 18–21, https://odi.org/documents/4737/9458.pdf. ←
19. Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock, “Escaping Capability Traps through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA),” 9. ←
20. World Bank, Enhanced Productivity, Accountability & Knowledge Systems for Improved Public Investment Outcomes in Education and Health Sectors, Project Paper P172078 (Washington, DC: World Bank, February 14, 2022), 10; Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, “Deliver Better: How Government Can Facilitate Recovery and Transformation in Africa,” April 29, 2021, accessed August 13, 2026, https://institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/deliver-better-how-government-can-facilitate-recovery-and-transformation-africa. ←
21. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, “Nigeria’s Fight for Debt Relief: Tracing the Path,” paper prepared for the Brookings Blum Roundtable, August 1, 2007, 2, 5–6, 12, 15. ←
22. African Capacity Building Foundation, “Our Approach,” accessed July 18, 2026, https://theacbf.org/our-approach/. ←
23. African Union, “Overview of Institutional Reforms,” accessed September 10, 2026, https://au.int/en/aureforms/overview; African Union, “Office of Strategic Planning and Delivery,” accessed July 18, 2026, https://au.int/en/directorates/office-strategic-planning-and-delivery. ←
24. Steven Gruzd and Yarik Turianskyi, “The ‘Kagame Reforms’ of the AU: Will They Stick?” SAIIA Occasional Paper 299 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of International Affairs, July 2019), 15–18, https://saiia.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Occasional-Paper-299-Gruzd-Turianskyi.pdf; Yarik Turianskyi, “Kagame’s AU Reforms Will Struggle to Survive without Him,” South African Institute of International Affairs, February 25, 2019, https://saiia.org.za/research/kagames-au-reforms-will-struggle-to-survive-without-him/. ←

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