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This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

diagnostic tools

Promoting rural youth engagement through radio and cell phones in Burundi

Submitted by Susana on Tue, 2009-05-26 11:57

For several weeks, local radio waves transmitted an unusual program in Burundi. This time, by combining radio and cell phones, the marginalized youth from rural Burundi received a chance to express their views on a series of issues that affect their daily lives. A rap song, composed with key findings of the study “Voices of the Youth” and the "Governance Survey," served as background of this pioneer and different approach, transmitted by Radio Publique Africaine.

Cell phones and radio were a way of outreaching places where information hardly makes its way, as well as to engage leaders in rural communities in debates about information obtained through studies that are hardly disseminated among the locals.

Global Integrity Index: looking around the black box of corruption

Submitted by Alfredo on Fri, 2009-02-20 15:40

A couple of days ago, Global Integrity launched its Global Integrity Index 2008, which assesses whether or not key national anti-corruption mechanisms are set in place, work properly and are accessible to citizens to hold governments accountable. 

Different from other governance measurements, this index and the scorecard doesn't try looking into the black box of corruption or the perceptions about it.  Instead, the approach is to look at the inputs and outputs coming in and out of the box, trying to show the difference between de jure and de facto institutional realities of countries and how political economy dynamics within them matter.

Open Budget Index and the need of transparency in government spending

Submitted by Alfredo on Mon, 2009-02-09 16:52

Last week the International Budget Partnership (IBP) released its 2008 version of the Open Budget Index (OBI), which analyzes budget transparency in 85 countries all around the world.   Among its main findings, the OBI shows that the level of transparency in the budgetary process is deporable in most of the evaluated countries -only 5 percent of them provide adequate information on spending to the public, while almost 30 percent of them provide very few or any information at all.

Although a group of countries are moving forward on this matter, the current state of budget transparency opens the door to waste and misappropriation of public funds in most places.   This situation is and will always be delicate, but in this time of expansionary and stimulus policies, an appropriate disclosure of the use of resources becomes very sensitive. 

The dilemmas of measuring corruption: is there an agreement of where should we move on?

Submitted by Alfredo on Thu, 2008-09-25 16:00

As corruption issues around the world seem to be endless, so is the debate about the best way to develop and use corruption indicators.  Whether aggregate or disaggregated; whether actionable or not; whether perception-based or experience-based; whether they should measure inputs or outputs; and whether assessments should be locally-owned or conducted by international institutions are just part of the on-going discussions in open forums and informal chats.

This month we witnessed the publication of two valuable efforts that move towards different directions on corruption measurement: (i) the 2008 Corruption Perception Index launched this week by Transparency International; and (ii) “A Users’ Guide to Measuring Corruption,” published at the beginning of this month by the UNDP Oslo Governance Centre and Global Integrity. 

While Transparency International’s approach relies on composite, cross-country and perception-based indicators, the User’s Guide suggests –among other things– the need for more locally owned assessments that capture the voice and experience of the poor and minority groups, as well as actionable measurements that give a better sense of what needs to be reformed.

GAC Country Diagnostics: a tool for partner countries serious about tackling the challenge of corruption

Submitted by Mark on Fri, 2008-08-01 17:34
When Pierre Nkurunziza came to power as president of Burundi in late 2005, he pledged to take serious action to address his country’s poor record on governance.  Burundi had considerable problems with official and petty corruption, and he asked the World Bank Institute (WBI) for support in developing an action plan for tackling these challenges.

 

Starting last year, WBI, working in partnership with the World Bank country team and the Government of Belgium, assisted Burundi in carrying out its first nationwide governance and anti-corruption (GAC) diagnostic survey.  Applying the same methodology that it has used in more than two dozen other countries, WBI helped Burundi create a multi-stakeholder steering group of government and civil society members. This group’s aim was to initiate and lead a process of identifying Burundi’s specific governance problems and designing an approach to address them.

 

How Citizen Feedback Strengthens Governance Reform in Francophone Africa

Submitted by Boris on Thu, 2008-07-10 16:31

Citizen feedback is helping many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa improve their overall governance and fight corruption. That good news was shared by some 90 representatives from government, civil society, the private sector, and the media from Francophone Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital of Kinshasa, and the DRC provinces of Bandundu, Katanga, and South-Kivu, who came together in Kinshasa to learn from each other and exchange their experiences.

 

 see video in French here