How US foreign aid can support a locally-driven fight against corruption

This is cross-posted from Oxfam America’s Politics of Poverty blog. (See also the accompanying story series on local leaders who stand up for accountability, make demands of government, and get results, which I’ve been pouring my energy into over the last few months.)  

Nepal’s first Integrity Idol Awards were given in January 2014 to shine a spotlight on honest and industrious civil servants in a country where government officials are often associated with corruption and incompetence. District Education officer Gyan Mani Nepal (standing) was chosen among five finalists from over 300 nominees. Their profiles were aired on national TV and posted on social media for people to vote via text message and over the internet. Read more: http://bit.ly/1xuJ3Ss Photo courtesy of Gyan Mani Nepal.
Nepal’s first Integrity Idol Awards were given in January 2014 to shine a spotlight on honest and industrious civil servants in a country where government officials are often associated with corruption and incompetence. District Education officer Gyan Mani Nepal (standing) was chosen among five finalists from over 300 nominees. Their profiles were aired on national TV and posted on social media for people to vote via text message and over the internet. Photo courtesy of Gyan Mani Nepal. Read more here: http://bit.ly/1xuJ3Ss

Few Americans would disagree that the aim of US foreign assistance to developing countries must be to help people help themselves. But Americans also don’t want their foreign aid to be lost to corruption—or worse, to fuel corruption.

Traditional top-down, donor-driven approaches have failed to deliver lasting results on fighting corruption, however. The US needs new ways to help people hold their governments accountable:

1) Treat corruption like the common cold.

There is no cure for the common cold—rather, the best therapy is to nurture the immune system. Likewise, the most sustainable and effective way to fight corruption is to nurture a country’s domestic accountability system. Aid can do this by supporting a locally-driven approach that affects the root causes of corruption, not just the symptoms.

2) Stop investing in form over function.

The reliance on technical fixes comes from the mistaken impression that corruption comes from a lack of local technical capacity “to govern like developed countries.” This misunderstanding of corruption leads donors to help countries set up new agencies and pass new laws and regulations, without paying enough attention to the whether they will work in practice.

3) Don’t turn off the aid spigot automatically.

Stopping aid sends a signal to domestic taxpayers that donors are serious about avoiding corruption. But there is no evidence that cutting off aid to a country with deteriorating governance conditions has any long-term effect on reducing corruption or increasing accountability. Cuts to aid disproportionately hurt people living in poverty, who are already experiencing the brunt of the effects of corruption, while having little impact on the power or comfort of corrupt elites.

4) Stop investing in white elephant projects.

Aid agencies fear that if aid money is corruptly diverted, political support for aid will disappear. However, when narrowly focused on only one type of risk, agencies lose sight of the equally significant risks to program outcomes, and to a donor’s reputation when locals view aid as unhelpful or badly targeted. Too often, the conventional approach leads to projects where donors can account for every dollar spent, but the project has little impact on helping people lift themselves out of poverty.

Aid should be a tool that helps countries and citizens take ownership over the development process. Congress, the American people, and most especially the citizens in the countries receiving assistance want aid to be accountable as well as effective. US foreign assistance can help unleash people’s ability to demand accountability from local authorities and instill a culture of integrity in public services. Invested in the right local leaders, foreign assistance can actually help push governments to do the right thing for their citizens.

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Learn more in Oxfam America’s new publication, To Fight Corruption, Localize Aid. We can’t let Congress miss out on the vast, untapped potential of effective local leaders who are fighting corruption.

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