were introduced in the country’s main port, Toamasina, starting in 2016, to incentivize customs inspectors to prevent tariff evasion; incentives were coupled with better monitoring through the introduction of IT systems to monitor inspectors’ performance. This helped increase fraud detection, decrease processing times and increase customs revenue. In a similar vein, the reform of land mapping and titling in Rwanda, including through the digitization of records, contributed to enhancing transparency and thus increasing the cost of malfeasance and reducing corrupt incentives in service delivery.

Access to health and education services and sometimes quality has overall <mark>improved in Africa over the past 20 years, arguably due to the fact that improved access is less demanding on institutions and has largely relied on large investments. De facto, the average literacy rate in SSA improved from 56 to 68 percent of the adult population and life expectancy at birth rose from 51 to 60 years between 2000 and 2020.</mark><sup>20</sup> <mark>In the education sector, countries have made substantial strides towards achieving universal primary education. In 2000, about a third of primary school age children and two-fifths of lower secondary school age children were out of school, compared to 17 and 33 percent respectively by the end of the 2010s (UNICEF 2021). This progress has been made possible by African countries’ policy commitment, reflected in the creation of enabling legal frameworks for free and compulsory education in over half of African countries (UNICEF 2021), support from the international community, including through global multi-stakeholder partnerships and funding such as the Global Partnership for Education, as well as an increase in public spending on education (the average education expenditure in Africa has risen in the first two decades of the 2000s, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP (UNICEF 2022)).</mark> <mark>Yet, tr</mark> ends in service _equality_ lag behind. Regional average measures of education and health equality<sup>21</sup> presented in Figure 10 show that SSA remains the lagging region on health equality and only above SAR in terms of education equality. These relatively stable averages hide high levels of variations at the country level. Some countries such as Burundi, Eritrea, and Namibia have seen large decreases in their scores, while others such as Gabon, Liberia, Republic of Congo, and Tanzania have seen sustained increases in their scores. To some extent, these subpar outcomes can be traced back to financing challenges. First, while spending on social services has increased, it remains close to the lower end of international benchmarks: for example, African countries spend on average 4.1 percent of their GDP on education, compared to a global average of 4.3 percent. There are wide variations in the levels of government education expenditure across countries, which range from about 1 percent of GDP in the Central African Republic to 8 percent in Sierra Leone (UNICEF 2021). This challenge is compounded by a bias toward recurrent expenditure, to finance salaries, versus capital expenditure to which countries devote on average 13 percent of total education expenditures only. Beyond financing, improvements in health and education hinge on governance challenges, including poor teacher and health worker management and the lack of autonomy and accountability of education and health organizations and workers - which negatively affect the quality of service delivery.

> 20 Data available at https://data.worldbank.org/.

> 21 Public service equality as defined by V-DEM refers to the extent that high quality service is guaranteed to all, sufficient to enable them to exercise their basic political rights as adult citizens.

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