Category Archives: Guest Post

Citizens Against Corruption: Report from the Front Line

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Pierre Landell Mills, a long-time and tireless advocate for putting governance at the center of development and a founder and board member of The Partnership for Transparency,  contributes the following guest post:

Everyone professes to hate corruption, but until recently few citizens believed they could stop it. Too often citizens accepted corruption, assuming it was a permanent societal disability to be borne with resignation. But people are increasingly intolerant of being squeezed for bribes and are ever more incensed at predatory officials growing fat on extortion and crooked deals. They want to do something about it.

And they are.  From the Philippines to Azerbaijan to Latvia to India to Mongolia and everywhere in between groups of courageous and dedicated citizens are taking direct action to root out corruption. Citizens Against Corruption: Report from the Front Line recounts the heroic struggle of local civil society organizations in more than 50 countries across four continents supported by The Partnership for Transparency Fund.  Among the examples the book details —   Continue reading →

Guest Post: Connecting Health and the Fight Against Corruption

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Taryn Vian, Associate Professor of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health, contributes the following guest post:

The recent endorsement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has prompted greater discussion and debate about the most important aspects of, and the most effective means for achieving, sustainable development. Most of the discussion of corruption in the context of the SDGs has focused on SDG 16 (“Promote just, peaceful, and inclusive societies”), which specifically includes anticorruption and related objectives among its targets (and which has prompted some debate on this blog – see here, here, here, and here.) But the fight against corruption is also closely linked to the achievement of another one of the SDGs: SDG 3 (“Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”).

On its face, SDG 3 is about health, not corruption. But the fight against corruption is in fact closely connected to SDG 3, and health professionals need to open their eyes to this connection. Corruption worsens health outcomes in many ways: siphoning off resources that are supposed to be devoted to health care (for example, through embezzlement and absenteeism), increasing the cost and decreasing the availability of medicines and medical equipment (or enabling the spread of fake medicines), creating barriers to use of health services (particularly by poor and uneducated people who are especially vulnerable to bribery) and reducing the overall availability and quality of health services. Thus the fight for increased health ought to be—perhaps must be—seen as inextricably connected to the fight against corruption.

Though measuring the impact of corruption on health is challenging, at this point we have a sufficiently large (and growing) body of evidence that corruption threatens health. Consider the following: Continue reading →

How to Corrupt an Anticorruption Commission: The Case of Nepal

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Narayan Manandhar, an international consultant on anticorruption, contributes the following guest post:

Nepalese lawmakers recently promulgated a draft constitution that envisages new roles and responsibilities for its anticorruption agency, the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority.  The proposed changes to the commission’s mandate shows how, if policymakers don’t have the guts to abolish an anticorruption agency, they can defang it by eroding its power and responsibilities.  This recent effort is the latest attempt by Nepal’s elite to ensure the commission cannot do what it is supposed to do: fight corruption.    Continue reading →