In TI's opinion poverty reduction cannot happen without tackling corruption and establishing good governance. TI says that corruption impedes good governance. This leads to poor health outcomes: mothers dying during childbirth and children struggling to live past the age of five. There is lack of clean water and toilets.
Poor countries tend to score badly on corruption indices, including the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (TICPI), and it is these countries that are most reliant on overseas aid. TI's analysis shows that higher levels of bribery are significantly correlated with levels of foreign aid. This suggests that corruption removes any positive incremental effect that foreign aid has on poverty reduction.
In too many cases, corrupt politicians in poor countries are said to be diverting government revenues for private gain while foreign aid pours in to maintain basic government services. TI further concludes that good governance through more voice and accountability or political stability helps in reducing the dependence on aid because it helps build strong sustainable institutions.
TI's proposed indicator to monitor the progress of Goal 16 is to measure the prevalence of bribery in a country. This can also be used for monitoring access to basic services, overseas development assistance, rule of law, or protection of fundamental freedoms, because all these things are interlinked.
While testing these links TI found, for example, that in countries with higher bribery rates people are more likely to be detained in prisons without any charges. Any positive effect of good governance on protecting fundamental freedoms is almost entirely negated by corruption.
While this shows corruption's undermining effects, it needs more data to establish clear links between corruption and other indicators, such as illicit financial flows. But even when data are available, there is no standardized approach to data collection and survey questions, which makes cross-country comparability almost impossible. So, it needs better coordination of how the data are collected and analyzed. The effectiveness of the new UN goals will lie in the quality of how they are implemented by the member-states. And in order to know if the Sustainable Development Goals are implemented, one needs to measure them and assess progress.
This means the UN must agree to:
-- Retain the target on corruption and bribery
-- Consider using data collected by well-respected third party data generators, such as the regional barometer networks that already collect comparable data on corruption and bribery
-- Identify data gaps and devise methodologies to fill these gaps
-- Ensure standardized data collection across countries to allow for global comparability in achieving the various targets.
Governments have adopted a new set of goals to change the world - and for the first time, their promises also include an end to corruption. This is a big leap forward from 2000 when global development goals were first set out. Now, the aim is to create a world free of extreme poverty, where all children are in school and in good health; where climate change is properly handled; where there is good governance and justice for all.
Goal 16 - which pledges a peaceful world, one with access to justice and open and accountable institutions - recognizes the development dividend from governance. In the poorest countries, one out of every two people has to pay a bribe to access basic services like education, health and water.
In setting new universal and global commitments world leaders have finally recognized the corrosive effect of corruption on the lives of the world's most vulnerable, and are prepared to act.
TI believes the world needs ambitious action plans with the right indicators to track progress. The level of bribery, for example, is a key indicator that can be used to help monitor more than just Goal 16. It needs feedback and monitoring to make sure the world is measuring the right things and the flexibility to readjust the process. Corruption must be eliminated to ensure it does not prevent achieving a better world.
A single indicator cannot measure everything - the world needs to have a 360-degree feedback loop. TI says it can, along with civil society help and compliment government efforts. TI further says it can offer its findings about levels of people's experience with bribery as well as local corruption.
Data from different sources, like NGOs, companies and others, is essential. Data must be open; shareable, comparable, accessible, timely and understandable. This is the only way to be able to correlate and use it: making data powerful.
Having the right indicators will only work if there is a system in place that can track them and respond to the picture that they reveal. Monitoring should happen regionally, nationally, and locally. This must be the case. Local people have the right to know and participate in sustainable development. To this end:
-- Governments must create a monitoring framework that builds on existing processes and is evidence-based. For example, other review processes - whether on open governance, human rights or anti-corruption - are happening. These need to be aligned together and tapped into.
-- Governments must create a system that can be easily implemented locally and feed results up globally. For example, the TI chapter in Uganda is using mobile phones with Internet access to allow anyone to check the amount of government money pledged to each school and health clinic - and the amount actually spent. This information also needs to be fed back globally to cross-check if progress is on track for the new goals.
-- The private sector and NGOs need to report back on how they are delivering. The hard numbers should be aligned to international reporting standards so they can be quickly gathered and compared. TI, an open data standard, offers a good solution.
TI's research in more than 100 countries shows that the level of corruption in any given country has a direct and significant correlation with that country's development. For example, in countries where more than 60 percent of people report paying a bribe, almost five times more people live on less than $1 a day than in countries where less than 30 percent of the population reports paying bribes.
Access to information, strong rule of law and anti-corruption legislation have a positive effect on MDG achievements in maternal health, literacy and clean water.
Bribery has a clear inverse relationship with MDG achievement. In countries where more people paid more bribes to obtain basic services, more women died during childbirth, fewer children lived beyond five years of age, more people went without clean drinking water or toilets, and fewer girls finished secondary school.
Bribery also wipes out the benefits of economic growth. For example, any gains made in improving access to safe drinking water when family income rises are offset by the negative effect of bribery. Fifty percent of schoolchildren do not complete primary school in countries where bribery is common.
Many different forms of public-sector corruption can hurt development. Primary school completion rates, for example, are affected by teacher absenteeism, the lack of availability of textbooks due to corruption and the quality of facilities such as classrooms often left in disrepair because funds for building get diverted due to corruption.
Public-sector corruption takes away almost one-third of the gains that better schooling can produce for reducing poverty. Even in countries with higher capacity to deliver educational services, such corruption adversely affects children's chances of completing their primary education.
Transparent and accountable governance can help development. In countries where rule of law is strong, progress has been made towards achieving the MDGs. Good governance is just as important as economic growth in reducing poverty.
When it comes to access and use of information, a more informed public is correlated with reductions in the number of children dying before five and better maternal health.
TI believes the UN must:
-- Establish a stand-alone governance goal with an anti-corruption focus to achieve open, accountable and participatory governance.
-- Ensure more comprehensive, comparable and timely data for all indicators, including development indicators, that measure levels of transparency and accountability.
-- Develop a monitoring system which is based on and promotes transparency, accountability and participation.
-- Of the 150 programmes assessed by Transparency International, two out of three faced medium risk, and one in 10 was exposed to high risk of corruption. TI's assessment shows that two things are especially important to ensure public funds are not mismanaged: Effective channels for reporting corruption and clear ethical rules for public officials managing these funds.
-- The need for trusted and independent channels to report corruption
-- Active citizens who take part in reporting corruption can be a very effective way to find out about corruption or the risk of it. But TI's assessment found that in many countries there were no channels in place to report or receive such complaints. In other cases it was difficult to know where to report. The need is for all management authorities to establish and publicize a complaint mechanism, and work on it to ensure that they effectively work in practice and that complaints are properly followed up.
-- Managing funds requires high integrity of public officials
-- Some countries require staff responsible for implementing a programme to adhere to particularly high integrity mechanisms. They must provide written statements on compliance with ethical rules, declare any conflicts of interest or disclose their assets. Others provide specific training programmes to their staff, thus increasing the awareness and skills to manage corruption risks in the grants.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2017