Table 1. The people, land and politics of the countries we study are briefly characterised in Table 2.<sup>6</sup> Together, Nigeria and Ethiopia have a combined population of 250 million people (UN Population Division, 2015), with the two countries predicted to become the third and tenth most populous countries in the world by 2050 respectively. The surveys there therefore cover 30% of sub-Saharan Africa’s current population and a set of public organizations that will be critical to efforts to serve the world’s poorest people in the future. Adding to the populations of Nigeria and Ethiopia those of Ghana, Indonesia, Pakistan and the Philippines, the surveys documented here outline government organizations that serve 776 million people. Four of these countries are predicted to be in the top ten most populous in the world in 2050. Thus, understanding the challenges to improving the civil service in these countries is of substantial importance in itself and acts as a window into the world of the civil service in the developing world.

Three of the surveys we study take the civil service organization as the unit of observation, asking questions about organization-level features and practices. They focus on the institutional environment in which civil servants interact, and provide a description of the key mechanism that links the civil service rules to individual incentives. This allows an insight into the environment in which the bureaucracy operates. For example, the surveys provide evidence on the management practices used in civil service organizations. They highlight the usefulness of measuring the architecture of the civil service, rather than focussing on the perceptions of individual civil servants only. Surveys that focus solely on public employees’ perceptions of their own experience provides a fragmented view of an organization. The same employee in multiple organizational environments may express the same level of engagement and satisfaction despite significant differences in managerial practice. Asking directors or other managerial staff to characterise the rules and informal practices that govern an organization provides a complementary perspective to those of individual civil servants. The structures on which officialdom is mapped are of particular importance given the systemic nature of the service. Public servants frequently face interlinked tasks that can be influenced by disparate actors throughout their service. Understanding the wider institutions that govern those interactions is of significant value.

The Ethiopian surveys take a representative sample of local-level governments - 248 woreda and city governments in the Woreda and City Benchmarking Survey (WCBS) and 368 organizations at a subset of 78 woredas in the Staff Turnover Study - with the survey focussing on staff turnover also surveying 10 federal organizations and 54 regional. Though we reach all regions, this is roughly a third of all woredas and a fraction of federal organizations. The WCBS is the fifth round of the Woreda and City Benchmarking Survey, and as stated by the researchers, is the strongest and most accurate of that series of surveys to date. It provides details of the facilities of each organization, how able the organization is to implement government policy in a range of sectors, and the degree of citizen involvement in government. The study was originally initiated as a means of monitoring the Public Sector Capacity Building Program, a donor-supported component of the Ethiopian Government’s wider agenda of public service reform. However, the initial rounds of information the survey provided, particularly on the citizen’s perspective on service delivery, generated demand for further rounds.

The turnover study overlaps in coverage with the WCBS but extends to more organizations. It is tightly focussed on staffing issues and the reasons for civil servants entering or leaving the service. The origin of the turnover study arose from the Government of Ethiopia’s concern that turnover of staff in the public service was too high. Thus, in contrast to the donor-initiated WCBS, the second civil servants survey we use from Ethiopia arose out of a targeted demand for information on the service from within government.

> 6Though detailed background on the civil services studied here will not be provided in this paper, relevant discussions can be found in Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 2013 (Ethiopia); Eghan, 2008 (Ghana); Prasojo, 2010 (Indonesia); Barkan, Gboyega and Stevens, 2001 (Nigeria); Imtiaz, 2013 (Pakistan); and, Brilliantes and Soncu, 2010 (Philippines).

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