SECTOR 1 Scores: Individual scores: 1 Country does not meet indicator 2 Country meets only a few aspects of indicator 3 Country meets some aspects of indicator 4 Country meets most aspects of indicator 5 Country meets all aspects of the indicator Average score: 4.5 (2006= 1.5, 2008 = 3.4, 2010 = 3.2) 1.8 Public information is easily accessible, guaranteed by law, to all citizens. There is no law on access to information, even though the Committee for the Safe-Keeping of Integrity (Comité pour la Sauvegarde de l’Intégrité, CSI) is in the drafting process on the matter. In the absence of such law, access to information is very difficult. In order to, for example, establish the number of political parties in Madagascar it took a journalist one day of dealing with administrative red tape in order to obtain the figure of 384. Similarly, it is literally impossible to obtain the CVs of Members of the Government, even though this is standard information. Citizens themselves don’t have access to information – in a large city such as Fianarantsoa (situated at 400km from Antananarivo), the official gazette, being their only source of information, arrives with a nearly four-month delay. Furthermore, only a minority of citizens knows about the existence of this prime governmental source of information In addition, in order to subscribe to the gazette, requests for subscriptions need to be justified. In sum, for the overwhelming majority of the media and citizens, access to information is an uphill battle. AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER MADAGASCAR 75