Robert Clark, Legal Research Manager at TRACE International, contributes today’s guest post:

Although corruption is a broadly entrenched social ill, each corrupt act is a decision made in its own specific place and time. To address the global problem of corruption, we need to focus our attention locally and join together in our individual acts of resistance. That dynamic is concisely expressed in the phrase “United Against Corruption”—the official slogan of 2016’s International Anti-Corruption Day (officially observed this past December 9^th). The associated “United Against Corruption” campaign focuses on corruption as an impediment to development, and offers a wide range of suggestions for what governments, media, businesses, and individuals can do to participate in the ongoing struggle. The campaign’s website includes a series of powerful videos illustrating the dire effects of corruption.

Children are often the ones that suffer the effects of corruption, but they can also play a key role in changing a society’s tolerance of it. The United Against Corruption campaign encourages individuals to “[e]ngage the youth of your country about what ethical behavior is, what corruption is and how to fight it.” In that spirit, TRACE International has created a series of short animated stories featuring the “Bribe Busters”—an elite young team of corruption fighters who fight corruption around the world with the help of a time travel teleportation super-computer. Their mission: to ensure that children everywhere have a fair future. Each episode focuses on a different aspect of corruption, and shows the viewer that although the world is full of unfairness, things don’t have to be that way. (For example, in episode two, the team is able to convince a government safety inspector not to look the other way at building code violations by showing him—with the help of their time-traveling computer friend—the devastation of a consequent building collapse. In another episode, the team helps an underserved remote village organize to get rid of a kleptocrat whose greed has prevented an important road project from being completed.) These videos, which have already been viewed in 44 different countries, are available on YouTube in English, French, and Spanish, with Arabic coming soon. Additionally, comic versions of the episodes (in PDF form) can be downloaded here.

TRACE is working with anti-corruption networks around the world–including Anti-Corruption International (ACI), the Economic and Financial Crimes commission (EFCC) / Creative Youth Initiative against Corruption, the Global Youth Anti-Corruption Network (GYAC), and ZERO Tolerance-Wise Youth Trust –to distribute the videos. If you are interested in distributing the Bribe Busters series in your anticorruption network, please contact us here. We hope that this series can not only help teach children about the harms of corruption (as if they didn’t already know), but also help them develop a sense that they can do something about it. We believe that’s also the basic message of the United Against Corruption campaign, and it’s one we are happy to endorse.