Tag Archives: Accountability Lab

Guest Post: Is It Worth Recognizing Integrity? Rethinking the Anticorruption Prize Ecosystem

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GAB welcomes this contribution by Blair Glencorse, Co-CEO of Accountability Lab and Co-Founder of Civic Strength Partners and  Shally Baloch, Junior Networks and Partnerships Officer at Accountability Lab. Follow the Lab on Linkedin.

Global corruption costs trillions of dollars a year. Global prizes for anticorruption total just $7.5m.

If you’ve been around the anticorruption field long enough, you’ve probably seen them: the fearless reporters who uncover procurement scandals, the whistleblowers who refuse to stay quiet, the community organizers who stand up to kleptocrats and, every now and then, the spotlight moments when someone hands them a prize and says, “Thank you for your courage.”

At Accountability Lab, we lovingly call this “naming and faming” and it has been part of our DNA for almost 15 years. And honestly? It matters. Awards help bust through cynicism, amplify role models, and remind the world that integrity is alive and kicking. They energize movements and validate the people doing some of the hardest work on the planet.

But here is the thing few people talk about: the anticorruption award ecosystem itself. Who is celebrated? Who isn’t?  And who sets the rules? Is the recognition ecosystem actually aligned with today’s corruption challenges? And crucially, is it investing at a scale that matches the global corruption crisis?

As anticorruption day approaches once again, we mapped more than 40 prizes connected to integrity, transparency, journalism, rule of law, and governance to understand the landscape. (List here.) What we found is both encouraging and deeply revealing.

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New Podcast Episode, Featuring Cheri-Leigh Erasmus

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In latest episode, host Dan Hough interviews Cheri-Leigh Erasmus, Global Director of Learning at the Accountability Lab. The convresation focuses principally on the Accountability Lab’s distinctive approach to building integrity in the civil service. Ms. Erasmus offers examples of this work from around the world, and suggests some lessons and insights for engaging new audiences in anticorruption work. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations: KickBack was originally founded as a collaborative effort between GAB and the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN). It is now hosted and managed by the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends!

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Doussouba Konaté and Moussa Kondo

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Doussouba Konaté and Moussa Kondo, who are, respectively, the Program Officer for the Accountability Lab and the Country Director for Accountability Lab Mali. (The Accountability Lab is a civil society group organized as a network of local Accountability Labs that focus on fighting corruption and promoting accountability and integrity.) In our conversation, Doussouba and Moussa describe the Accountability Lab’s “human-centric” approach to fighting corruption, and discuss some of their main initiatives. These include the Integrity Icon project, which strives to “name and fame” honest government officials, and the civic action teams that help gather information in, and disseminate information to, local communities to facilitate collective action and promote accountability, while combating fake news. Our interview also discusses how, more recently, Accountability Lab Mali has sought to track the disbursement of COVID-19 relief funds. In addition to these specific initiatives, we also discuss the broader political situation in Mali and how the political challenges facing the country relate to the corruption problem, and what the highest priorities for anticorruption reform in Mali should be right now.

You can find this episode here. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Guest Post: Pushing for Anticorruption through the G20 Civil Society Engagement Process

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Today’s guest post is from Blair Glencorse, the Executive Director of the Accountability Lab. 

As many readers of this blog know, the annual G20 meeting has a variety of associated processes, including a forum for engagement with global civil society known as the C20. This is an opportunity for civil society organizations (CSOs)—including grassroots groups, rights-focused organizations, and other activists—to feed policy recommendations directly to the most powerful governments in the world. This process has not been without challenges, especially when the G20 meeting is held in a country that is not exactly friendly to civil society activism (including Russia in 2013, China in 2016 and this year in Saudi Arabia). More generally, promises have not always matched realities, and governments have not always lived up to their commitments. Nevertheless, the C20 remains an important mechanism for ensuring that diverse, citizen-oriented voices from civil society are heard as part of G20 decision-making.

The C20 has a number of working groups, including an Anti-Corruption Working Group (ACWG), which I am co-leading this year with Dr. Saleh Al-Sheniefi. Our mandate is to prepare “comprehensive recommendations for consideration by leaders on how the G20 could continue to make practical and valuable contributions to international efforts to combat corruption.” The ACWG has active participation from civil society members from more than 50 countries, and—after consulting with other G20 engagement groups and consulted with numerous external experts—we have drafted a 3-page policy paper which will be sent to the parallel G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group in mid-May. The paper is open for comments for the next several weeks; and we would welcome any and all ideas from this blog’s readership.

While there are obviously many aspects of the corruption problem and its potential solutions that we could have addressed, we chose to focus on what we understand to be the G20’s main anticorruption priorities. (Our thinking is that, while getting the G20 to listen and live up to its commitments is always challenging at best, the odds are better if civil society’s recommendations align with the G20’s own sense of its top priorities in this area.) In particular, our policy paper focuses on the following items: Continue reading →

Lights, Camera, Integrity? From “Naming and Shaming” to “Naming and Faming”

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“Can a reality TV show discourage corruption?” This was the recent attention-grabbing headline of an article in The Economist about Integrity Idol, the brainchild of the NGO Accountability Labs. It was started in Nepal in 2014, and has since spread to Pakistan, Mali, Liberia, Nigeria, and South Africa.

The format of the show is simple. Citizens are asked to nominate civil servants whom they believe display the highest standards of honesty and integrity. These nominations are then reviewed by a panel of judges comprising local and international experts, who select five finalists. Videos are then produced, each around 2-5 minutes long, containing excerpts from an interview with the finalists and their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates, along with glimpses into their work lives. (See here and here for examples). These videos are disseminated among the citizenry via traditional and non-traditional media. Citizens vote for their favorite, and the “Integrity Idol” is crowned.

This isn’t the first time a non-traditional cultural medium has been used to spread an anticorruption message. Other approaches, including museums, TV dramas, music, and poetry  have been discussed on this blog previously (see here, here, here and here). Thanks to Integrity Idol, reality TV can be added to the list. That might seem a bit surprising. Reality TV has a (deserved) reputation for depicting an over-dramatized, intentionally provocative, and often manipulated caricature of real life. One hopes that no one would cite Real Housewives of New York as a reliable source for understanding the lives of real housewives in New York! Integrity Idol is different: it is an intentional effort to draw attention to real stories of real people, and often the unaltered stories of these people are compelling in and of themselves. The vision of Accountability Labs and its founding director, Blair Glencorse, is to “support change-makers to develop and implement positive ideas for integrity in their communities, unleashing positive social and economic change.” Continue reading →