From Research to Practice: The Journey of GI ACE
On the inaugural day of the conference, research projects came together to present findings from three years of research, with the hope of answering the questions: what problems have they have tackled, what approaches did they take, and what findings and lessons have they learned?
Storytelling Workshop Liberating Structures
Speakers: Kay Worth and Daljeet Singh
In the ‘Liberating Structures’ workshop, facilitators helped research projects consider different methods and frameworks that they could use to communicate their work.
Anti-Money Laundering & Banking/Reputation
Speakers: Tom Mayne, Tena Prelec
This project aims to investigate the laundering of monies and reputations by elites from African and Central Asian kleptocracies by looking at the due diligence requirements in the banking, real estate, charitable and public relations sectors. For more information on this project, see here.
Regulating Cross-Border Trading in East Africa
Speakers: Jacqueline Klopp, Brian Baraza, David Orega
This project explores how COVID-19 has impacted small-scale traders in East Africa and the resiliency of corruption at the border. For more information on this project, see here.
What are the Lessons for Practitioners?
Speaker: Claudia Baez Camargo
This project uncovered informal practices of networks of political, business, and social actors that undermine anti-corruption efforts. It worked with case studies from East Africa and Central Asia to explore how anti-corruption interventions can explicitly factor in existing informal networks. For more information on this project, see here.
Tanzania Anti-Bribery Intervention
Speaker: Claudia Baez Camargo
In this project, a behavioural approach was adopted to develop and test an anti-corruption intervention in the Tanzanian health sector, recognising that social norms can fuel practices of gift-giving and bribery between health service providers and users. For more information on this project, see here.
International Business Deal-Making, Beliefs, and Local Social Norms
Speakers: Thorsten Chmura, Liz Dávid-Barrett
This project studies how corrupt practices in international investments are related to social norms and beliefs about the behavior of others. For more information on this project, see here.
Civil Service Reform and Anti-Corruption
Speakers: Christian Schuster, Jan Meyer-Sahling
The project designs and implements state-of-the-art ethics training courses with civil servants in Nepal and Bangladesh and evaluates their effects on corruption and (un)ethical behaviour in a field experiment. For more information on this project, see here.
Urban Planning and Corruption in Africa
Speaker: Laura Nkula-Wenz
This project focuses on how professional communities of planners in South Africa and Zambia live up to their roles as drivers of integrity. For more information on this project, see here.
Detecting and Deterring Medication Theft
Speakers: Ryan Jablonski, Mariana Carvalho
This project tests the effectiveness of two interventions designed to reduce medication theft – one aimed at informing clinic officials and one aimed at empowering citizen monitors. For more information on this project, see here.
Learning from Effective Law Enforcement
Speakers: Gerhard Anders
This project is the first comparative study of law enforcement efforts targeting high-level corruption in Africa. The focus on enforcement practice promises to generate new evidence regarding investigations and prosecutions in Nigeria, Tanzania, and Malawi. For more information on this project, see here.
Hiding the Beneficial Owner and the Proceeds of Corruption
Speakers: Jackie Harvey, Sue Turner, Peter Sproat
Focussed on Nigeria, this project examines current approaches and system weakness for successfully identifying the beneficial owner, thereby, preventing the laundering of the proceeds of corruption and aiding asset recovery. For more information on this project, see here.
Curbing Corruption in Procurement
Speakers: Liz Dávid-Barrett, Mihály Fazekas, Gilbert Sendugwa
The Red Flags method uses large datasets to develop practical tools to hold governments and funders to account, but improving accountability and reducing corruption depends on users having the skills and tools to interpret data and use our method. This project utilises the red-flags methodology to build online analytics portals and train a range of stakeholders to use them to identify malfeasance in procurement. For more information on this project, see here.
Centralised versus Decentralised Monitoring to Reduce Corruption
Speakers: Amrita Dhillon
Most countries have different agencies performing top-down audits and social audits. This project investigates the interaction between different types of audits and the effects on service delivery, using evidence on leakages in two major public works programmes across states in India. For more information on this project, see here.