Investing in Africa's Legal Infrastructure: The Law Reform Value Chain

Africa’s development debate is dominated by physical infrastructure – roads, ports, power plants. Yet there is a less visible form of infrastructure that determines whether any of these investments deliver lasting returns: the legal architecture on which a country’s institutions, markets, and governance depend.

Across the continent, governments with serious reform ambitions face a common obstacle. Their policy agendas are often bold – attract investment, modernise regulation, expand access to public services. But the legal frameworks on which these ambitions depend are, in many cases, simply not fit for purpose. This is not a failure of political will. It is a structural problem, one that runs deeper than any single government’s tenure and demands a fundamentally different approach to how we think about reform processes.

A government’s ability to deliver on any reform agenda depends on the strength of its legal architecture – the laws, regulations, institutions, and judicial systems that give policy its force. Rwanda’s comprehensive legal overhaul after the 1994 genocide demonstrates what becomes possible when a government invests deliberately in this foundation. This infrastructure is every bit as critical as the roads and power plants that dominate the development conversation, and considerably harder to build.

The Inherited Burden

Many African governments inherited legal frameworks designed for different economies, in a different era, and with a different set of priorities. Often the core of the legal architecture dates back to colonial administrations. Over the years, statutes have been added, rewritten, amended, withdrawn, or quietly allowed to become dead letters with little thought to the coherence of the whole. Political expediency and the demands of international partners – whose calls for statutory reform are all too rarely accompanied by the necessary technical assistance – have taken precedence over systematic legal engineering.

The pattern is visible in the most fundamental areas of law. Criminal procedure codes and penal codes for instance – the statutes that govern how a state investigates, prosecutes, and punishes – have in many jurisdictions been amended dozens of times over decades, each time to address a pressing concern: a corruption crisis, a new international convention, or the priorities of a new government. The cumulative effect is a framework that no longer functions as a system. It becomes, paradoxically, a barrier to the rule of law it was designed to uphold.

The Law Reform Value Chain

Effective reform demands investment in every stage of the process, from the initial formulation of policy through to the judicial frameworks that make laws enforceable. At CIJ, we call this the law reform value chain.

The chain begins with policy formulation - the research and analysis that inform what a law needs to achieve. It moves through legislative drafting, where policy is translated into precise, enforceable legal text. Then it continues through enactment, from the consultative process of building support and securing parliamentary adoption. Implementation follows: building the institutions, training officials, and establishing the operational systems that bring legislation to life. At the final stage, courts, tribunals and other dispute resolution mechanisms, must be equipped to interpret and enforce the law in practice.

Why Piecemeal Reform Fails

In practice, reform is rarely approached as a complete system. Some governments move straight to drafting legislation without fully developing the underlying policy, then find themselves revisiting fundamental questions mid-process. Subsidiary legislation, where much of the operational detail sits, is frequently an afterthought, considered only after the primary law has been enacted, creating implementation gaps that persist for years.

The ambition for legal reform across the continent far outstrips the institutional capacity to deliver it. Closing that gap is one of the highest-return investments available to governments and their partners.

The capacity gap in legislative drafting is one of the least discussed constraints on African development. Governments with ambitious reform agendas routinely find that their drafting teams are too small and too overstretched to keep pace. The bottleneck degrades the quality of every statute produced and slows the entire reform pipeline. Add to this a body of law often inherited from the colonial era and amended without coordination, and the result is a legal architecture that frustrates reform rather than enabling it.

At CIJ, we work across this full value chain. Since 2024, we have supported the development of more than 20 laws across multiple countries and trained over 160 legislative drafters through our Drafting Laws That Matter programme, the only dedicated training of its kind on the continent. We believe that good laws should be clearly drafted, predictable, and enforceable – written with enough precision that even non-lawyers can understand them. Achieving that standard requires sustained investment.

Working From the Inside

There is no shortage of political will for reform across the continent. The constraint is capacity. CIJ works with governments that have a genuine commitment to strengthening their legal foundations and the institutional seriousness to see the work through.

Strengthening legal systems requires working closely with the governments responsible for them. Yet international support for governance reform has not traditionally been structured this way. Funding is often directed towards actors outside government, and the technical assistance that does reach government tends to be short-term, narrowly scoped, and tied to external priorities rather than domestic reform agendas.

CIJ is designed to function as an extension of government legal teams. We maintain a permanent in-country presence, combining local expertise with international experience, and we are accountable to the reform priorities that governments themselves have set. In the countries where we work, this means engaging across the full machinery of government: justice ministries, parliaments, judiciaries, sector regulators, and the line ministries responsible for the policy areas under reform. The breadth is deliberate. Reform that spans the full value chain requires relationships at every level. The objective is to strengthen government's own capabilities so that reform becomes self-sustaining, long after any single engagement is concluded.

The Case for Investment

The demand is substantial. Since CIJ’s founding, governments across the continent have sought support on reform priorities spanning mining, energy, financial markets, public-private partnerships, technology, carbon markets, and labour. The breadth of these requests confirms what the evidence shows: none of these sectors can function well without a sound legal foundation.

Legal architecture does not command headlines the way a new port or power station does. But it determines whether those investments achieve their purpose. Countries that invested deliberately in their legal foundations created the conditions for sustained prosperity. For governments serious about reform, and for the international partners who support them, investment in government’s law reform capabilities is not an optional extra. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.