Corporate governance and company performance across Sub-Saharan African countries

•We examine the association between corporate governance and company performance.•We find a positive association between governance and accounting performance.•We find a negative association between governance and market valuation.•We find not all governance practices are highly associated to performance.

This paper examines the extent to which publicly listed companies across Sub-Saharan African countries have adopted “good corporate governance” practices. We investigate the association of these practices with companies’ accounting performance and market valuation. The findings indicate that companies across Sub-Saharan Africa have only partly implemented good corporate governance practices. We find a positive association between our constructed index of good corporate governance practices and accounting performance. However, we find a negative association between the corporate governance index and the market valuation. When the sub-indices are considered, we find that only the board of directors and the audit committee sub-indices are associated positively and significantly with accounting performance. However, we find that only the audit committee sub-index is associated negatively and significantly with market valuation.