Our work in this area focuses on supporting partners’ efforts to address corruption-related challenges. We help partners who are trying to tackle particular challenges understand and address their root causes, and take actions that are informed by meaningful data and supported by ongoing reflection and learning. We believe this is the best way to address the complex power dynamics and patterns of incentives that drive corruption and entrench vested interests. We use the insights and evidence from this problem-focused work in particular regions and sectors, to inform the evolution of the anti-corruption agenda beyond the moralistic, zero-tolerance and one-size fits-all approaches that have tended to be center stage.
Current Projects
Africa Integrity Indicators
The Africa Integrity Indicators (AII) is a research project initiated by Global Integrity in 2012, in collaboration with the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. AII focuses on African governance in practice, examining how policies are implemented to support governments, citizens, and civil society and assessing key social, economic, political, and anti-corruption mechanisms at the national level across all 54 countries of the African continent.
After 10 years of data collection led by Global Integrity, the AII project is being transitioned to the African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP), who will take over the collection and dissemination of the AII data for future rounds, beginning in 2023.
Learn more about the Africa Integrity Indicators project and explore the data on our site.
Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence
Funded by UK aid from the British people, GI-ACE works to support researchers generating world-class evidence on anti-corruption efforts, in order to inform practitioners’ efforts to deliver better outcomes. Working alongside 14 teams conducting operationally relevant, rigorous, and actionable research, we help communicate and share findings in ways that support practitioners to design and implement more effective anti-corruption strategies. In addition to generating evidence about anti-corruption initiatives, we are learning how to strengthen partnerships between researchers and practitioners, and how to communicate about research in ways that meet the needs of practitioners.
Open Data for Anti-Corruption
Working with the Open Data Charter, the African Open Data Network, the Latin American Open Data Initiative, and the International Development Research Centre this project builds on the experience of country-level reformers from Chile, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, and other countries who have sought to design and implement policy commitments within the Open Government Partnership. Our aim is to support country-level efforts to leverage the power of open data to address corruption-related challenges, and through the process generate and share learnings about the design and implementation of policies to address corruption.
Data for Accountability
We are working with partners in Colombia and Nigeria and the Transparency and Accountability Initiative to generate evidence about the effectiveness of different approaches to using data to address governance challenges. In Nigeria our partners are the Public and Private Development Centre, which focuses on procurement, and the Human and Environmental Development Agenda, which focuses on illicit assets. In Colombia, our partners are Transparencia por Colombia and Akubadaura, which focus on extractives. We are learning about how political dynamics enable or hinder the use of data to address local accountability gaps, and using these lessons to inform grant making and the design and implementation of projects that aim to use data to fight corruption and demand accountability.
Fighting Kleptocracy with Human Stories
We aim to bridge the gap between international and local anti-kleptocracy efforts by highlighting the connections between high-level actions, such as investigative journalism, strategic litigation, and problems citizens face in their daily lives. We began this project in 2019 by bringing together a coalition of front line actors in the Central African region driven to educate everyday citizens how kleptocracy negatively impacts their lives. We now support a five-member country team made up of Cameroon, Angola, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo by helping to track and test whether their program activities result in their desired outcomes. We are learning whether interventions undertaken by local actors can start shifting the conversation around kleptocracy at country and international levels, and learning about how we can better support frontline actors in crafting and implementing adaptive strategies to tackle kleptocracy.