A Proven Model for Fighting Administrative Corruption in the Congo
Location
Innovative Resources Management (IRM) has been delivering a range of anti-corruption services over the past five years in the DRC that involve illegal taqx collection on rivers, roads and ports. These service specifically include: (a) inventorying and assessment of the types and corruption that predominate in rural areas (b) their frequency (c) the orders of magnitude of costs that different stakeholders bear from the various types of corruption. With objective information in hand, we convene multi-stakeholder processes to then help self-constituted groups decide strategies and actions to combat corruption. The activities we have supported include (a) information support to increase transparency (b) analysis of options for potential collective action (c) trainings in: (1) advocacy (2) participation in decentralized governance processes (3) understanding fiscal process and citizen prerogative in budgetary oversight (4) local monitoring of corruption indices (5) institutional and technical strengthening of anti-corruption committees (CLATs) (6) inter-stakeholder synergies for enhanced communication efficiencies (7) relationship building between elected parliamentarians and their constituencies (8) awareness raising of parliamentarians of their oversight role over public administration (9) awareness raising of citizen rights under the law, and obligations under the law vis à vis taxes and fees solicited by administrative services.
The primary beneficiaries and target groups include all segments of Congolese society living at provincial and territorial levels in five provinces (Bandundu, Equateur, Orientale, Maniema and Kinshasa) including: civil society, women’s groups, church groups, private sector operators, NGOs, and public administrators including the police, military, and al national administrative service providers.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
Your idea
Focus of activity
Community Involvement
Year the initative began (yyyy)
2002
Positioning of your initiative on the mosaic diagram,
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Lack of Accountability & Transparency
Which of the principles is the primary focus of your work?
Create Collaborative Systems
If you believe some other barrier or principle should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic:
Our anti-corruption activities focus on identifiying and dismantling physical and non-physical barriers on rivers and roads – the principal communication network in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The activity addresses all elements within the mosaic. Cynicism and apathy are a part of the culture of acceptance of administrative corruption over the past 30 years. Corruption has thrived due to limited information and complicity of public administrators and civil society. Lack of accountability and transparency has been the backdrop in 100% of the situations we began working in. Absence of rule of law due to a non-performing judicial system does not offer timely recourse. And until our initiative, society perceived few vehicles for collective participation to combat corruption.
Name Your Project
A Proven Model for Fighting Administrative Corruption in the Congo
Describe Your Idea
Innovative Resources Management (IRM) has been delivering a range of anti-corruption services over the past five years in the DRC that involve illegal taqx collection on rivers, roads and ports. These service specifically include: (a) inventorying and assessment of the types and corruption that predominate in rural areas (b) their frequency (c) the orders of magnitude of costs that different stakeholders bear from the various types of corruption. With objective information in hand, we convene multi-stakeholder processes to then help self-constituted groups decide strategies and actions to combat corruption. The activities we have supported include (a) information support to increase transparency (b) analysis of options for potential collective action (c) trainings in: (1) advocacy (2) participation in decentralized governance processes (3) understanding fiscal process and citizen prerogative in budgetary oversight (4) local monitoring of corruption indices (5) institutional and technical strengthening of anti-corruption committees (CLATs) (6) inter-stakeholder synergies for enhanced communication efficiencies (7) relationship building between elected parliamentarians and their constituencies (8) awareness raising of parliamentarians of their oversight role over public administration (9) awareness raising of citizen rights under the law, and obligations under the law vis à vis taxes and fees solicited by administrative services.
The primary beneficiaries and target groups include all segments of Congolese society living at provincial and territorial levels in five provinces (Bandundu, Equateur, Orientale, Maniema and Kinshasa) including: civil society, women’s groups, church groups, private sector operators, NGOs, and public administrators including the police, military, and al national administrative service providers.
Innovation
Description of initiative
Innovative Resources Management (IRM) has been delivering a range of anti-corruption services over the past five years in the DRC that involve illegal taqx collection on rivers, roads and ports. These service specifically include: (a) inventorying and assessment of the types and corruption that predominate in rural areas (b) their frequency (c) the orders of magnitude of costs that different stakeholders bear from the various types of corruption. With objective information in hand, we convene multi-stakeholder processes to then help self-constituted groups decide strategies and actions to combat corruption. The activities we have supported include (a) information support to increase transparency (b) analysis of options for potential collective action (c) trainings in: (1) advocacy (2) participation in decentralized governance processes (3) understanding fiscal process and citizen prerogative in budgetary oversight (4) local monitoring of corruption indices (5) institutional and technical strengthening of anti-corruption committees (CLATs) (6) inter-stakeholder synergies for enhanced communication efficiencies (7) relationship building between elected parliamentarians and their constituencies (8) awareness raising of parliamentarians of their oversight role over public administration (9) awareness raising of citizen rights under the law, and obligations under the law vis à vis taxes and fees solicited by administrative services.
The primary beneficiaries and target groups include all segments of Congolese society living at provincial and territorial levels in five provinces (Bandundu, Equateur, Orientale, Maniema and Kinshasa) including: civil society, women’s groups, church groups, private sector operators, NGOs, and public administrators including the police, military, and al national administrative service providers.
Innovation
To our knowledge, the IRM approach to combating corruption is unique in Africa. From the outset we have avoided focusing on “name and blame” tactics that personalize corruption, particularly among “grand corruption” perpetrators. We also have voided “classic” advocacy that is preoccupied with changing laws, regulations and ordinances as the principal mechanism for addressing corruption in favor of creating grass roots momentum that produces a bottom up approach to combating corruption, but one that has the capacity to become “horizontal”; e.g. it is structured to enable strategic partnerships with outside agencies, but is nonetheless driven by local interest groups.
The core of our program involves (a) objective assessment of corruption indicators (b) collective analysis of these indicators among impacted stakeholders (c) facilitated consensus building on approaches and specific activities to combat corruption (d) implementation of the consensus based plans (e) capacity building in complementary skill areas including: community based monitoring and reporting; community analysis of options; revenue generation to support sustainable local watch-dogging and participation in decentralized governance; understanding and oversight of
Local budgetary process and implementation.
We use several technologies in innovative ways to support our work. These include: (a) use of high frequency radios for networking across five provinces; (b) use of a 200-ton barge as a mobile training and corruption monitoring facility along remote primary and secondary river systems; (c) use of the Community Options Analysis and Investment Toolkit (COAIT) for enabling communities to identify ways to engender sustainability of “governance” sector activities (an area where sustainable financing mechanisms are not self evident and off-the-shelf available); use of Consensys® for consensus building and conflict avoidance/management.
Delivery Model
Our delivery model has three principal mechanisms: (a) outreach to clients in the field (b) outreach and two-way communication using high frequency radios (phonies) (c) use of a 200 ton barge as a mobile training facility for remote riverine communities which otherwise have been virtually cut off from government services for the past 15 years.
We measure impact through (a) biannual data collection exercise of corruption indices in rural ports, rural waterways, and in the principal ports where goods and services are delivered in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (b) weekly reports in from anti-corruption committees (CLATs) on corruption incidents in their jurisdictions.
We have facilitated contacts between CLATs and print, radio and television media so that communication also occurs directly between these entities. As corruption has become a favourite theme in the media over the past few years, this outreach and communication mechanism is becoming increasingly relevant in creation of momentum in the combat of corruption in remote rural areas.
Key Operational Partnerships
The key partnerships we have established involve stakeholder categories including civil society groups, donors, public administration services, the private sector, the military, and non-governmental organizations.
Our initial partner in our work was the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) which came up with the concept of fighting corruption that was strangling agricultural production and marketing in key producer regions towards the end of the civil war in the DRC in the early 2000s. In establishing administrative corruption as a crucial constraint to al development sectors in the DRC, USAID crucially established the logic and legitimacy for this program that few believed could ever become functional. This partnership still endures through four phases of project activities.
Without the engagement of key civil society groups in the provinces and territories we are working in, this initiative could never have gotten off the ground. Church groups, women’s marketing groups, customary chiefs and their constituencies all play fundamental roles, as they are the “owners” of the initiative and the fruit it bears.
The private sector has been very cooperative as commerce has been curtailed for years, detrimentally impacting commerce and productivity. Consumers in regional centers and the national capital have also been key partners, through dissatisfaction over high consumer prices. This has led to active engagement of the media in anti-corruption activities.
Impact
Financial Model
The financial model used is based on the following assumptions (a) an initial subsidy in combating corruption is unavoidable in the DRC (b) the creation of conditions for thereafter is of fundamental importance.
Given that USAID has funded four phases of this project since 2002, it is clear that the activity has been subsidized. Congolese clients have not paid anything for the services we have provided. Clients have contributed in-kind contributions in the form of (a) time and labor (b) housing for CLATs, radio sets and office equipment. In this manner, the poorest have had access to the project for five years, as we have specifically targeted some of the most remote and marginalized communities in the provinces we are working in.
Our principal concern over these years has centered on how to avoid creating dependency among beneficiary groups while on the other hand, identifying how we can facilitate the basis for sustainability among these same beneficiary groups.
We are currently highlighting use of the Community Options Analysis and Investment Toolkit (COAIT) as the basis for anti-corruption committees (CLATs) to assess feasible options for promoting sustainability through revenue generation to continue their work in the absence of our subsidized project interventions. Our hypothesis is that the more we can link financial stakes with more abstract governance/anti-corruption stakes, the higher probability for sustainability during this final project phase ending in October.
What percentage, if any, of the total operating costs does earned income (from products, services, or other fees) represent?
0
How is the initiative financed? Is it financially self-sustainable or profitable? How much do beneficiaries contribute?
As explained above, the initiative has been financed by the United States Agency for International Development since 2002. Because the DRC was at war during these years, and because our clientele on the ground generates on average $78 worth of revenues annually for a female led household, and $117/year of revenues where male led, we felt that the emphasis from the outset had to be on creating an institutional basis for addressing corruption issues which never had been tackled before.
As mentioned, our strategy has been to create a momentum via a coalition movement that is increasingly technically and institutionally capable of reaching out to other partners. Because the DRC is one of the richest countries in the world in natural resource endowment, many private sector players wish to work in remote areas of the country. Given new decentralized governance structures coupled to incoming private sector interests, our strategy to enable local stakeholders to identify options and negotiate incomes – on a subsidized basis – remains valid from our standpoint.
The only contribution we demand is stakeholder time and engagement – to receive trainings; to monitor and report on corruption; to participate in local decentralized governance as opportunities evolve.
Effectiveness
The concrete impact of our project has been the formation of over 200 anti-corruption committees (CLATs) in five provinces, and the demand for the formation of CLATs in provinces where the project does not operate. In addition, where operational, these CLATs achieved reductions in illegal administrative service operation. In much of the DRC, Kinshasa included, administrative services were operating with impunity and extra-legally. Where four agencies were authorized to work in ports and along the riverways, up to 25 agencies (occasionally more) could be found operating, illicitly seeking rents to make up for shortfalls in salaries. In areas where the police and judiciary were either non-existent, non-functional, or complicit in perpetuating illicit rent seeking with impunity, CLAT impacts have been significant.
We estimate that 200,000 people have directly benefited from our project, and another 200,000 have benefited indirectly via increased trade and reduced prices of goods marketed. These figure are very conservative, as the catchment area in which our project works is tremendous, and the precise census figures for beneficiary populations in the areas we work are outdated.
On a policy level, we continue to work with the President’s Office, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Justice, and with the national and provincial Assemblies, to formulate modifications to Decree 036/2002 that will more strictly circumscribe which agencies can work in ports and riverways, along with those able to police abuses and non-compliance.
Our work has also influenced international players interested in working on anti-corruption in the DRC, from Transparency International, to the Open Society Institute and Chatham House. Donors such as DFID, UNDP and World Bank are well aware of our program. We recently signed a Cooperation Agreement with the International Commission for the Congo, Oubangi and Sangha River Basins (CICOS) to combat corruption throughout the region.
Which element of the program proved itself most effective?
Once Congolese stakeholders identified that the emergence of anti-corruption committees and their capacity building was the consensus priority for combating corruption at provincial and territorial levels, this activity (CLAT emergence) became the anchor for the entire program and as such, has in fact been the most effective element of the program. In many ways, emphasizing CLATs has been one way for us to break with much of the precedent in democracy and governance programming in anti-corruption work that has focused on either the legislative basis for addressing corruption, and/or on descriptive pieces on systems of corruption that lacked applied responses for participatorily addressing corruption.
CLATs have given anti-corruption work in the DRC a human dimension to what heretofore had been an otherwise intractable problem that no one had ever attempted to address. Because CLATs have succeeded in a number of provinces in addressing various types of corruption ranging from military rape and human rights abuses of citizens to administrative agency abuses in illicit rent seeking, and now to general public administration malfeasance in decentralized governance, the CLAT model is offering hope to a public that otherwise has accepted that the culture of corruption (known locally as tracasseries) could never change as it was so integrally seen as part of Congolese culture, and was perpetuated by citizens themselves each ande every time they failed to denounce a tracasserie they fully well understood was illegal. Here too the complicitous role of traditional chiefs, in addition to public administrators, has come to be examined by CLATs, with society now seeing that change even at traditional levels of public sphere behaviours can be achieved.
Number of clients in the last year?
On a day to day basis, in the past year we have worked directly with approximately 45 CLATs comprising an average of 100 members per CLAT. Each CLAT in turn reaches out to a much broader community, ranging from 1,000 people to over 10,000 for CLATs located in urban centers. Assuming conservatively a “catchment group” 2,000 clients per CLAT leads to a daily beneficiary group of 50,000 people.
We do however maintain working relations on an intermittent basis with the range of 200 CLATs whose emergence we have facilitated. Using the figure of 2,000 clients per CLAT on average, this would lead us to total clientele of 400,000 people.
Complicating our case is the fact that our anti-corruption activity is working for policy reforms and new legislation at a national level that will, in fact, benefit all Congolese countrywide. On a more focused level, our trainings linking CLAts to parliamentarians will, at a minimum, enable elected parliamentarians to better service their constituencies across five provinces of the country. This figure of potential beneficiaries will far exceed the 400,000 person figure.
In summary, depending on the definition of “Client”, during the past year our clientele has ranged from 50,000 to 200,000 to ultimately 60 million people, if the full impact of our work is calculated on a national policy level.
What is the potential demand?
The potential demand for this anti-corruption activity is tremendous not only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but in the Republic of Congo and in Central African Republic as well. We have been approached by the governments of both countries through our partnership with the International Commission for the Congo, Oubangi and Sangha River Basins (CICOS) to establish an anti-corruption activity that will reduce the physical and non-physical barriers to commerce in these river basins that as in the DRC, is strangled by administrative corruption. This demand was enunciated at a world Bank sponsored meeting in Bangui, CAR in September 2006, and is currently being followed up upon now by IRM jointly with CICOS.
As mentioned above, the activity is potentially replicable across the entire territory of the DRC. We have received correspondence from NGOs in Kasai Orientale province and North Kivu of the DRC. We also have received solicitation from populations in provinces we are already working in who are stifled by corruption in areas where logging operations are highly developed and where community perceptions of abuse of the Forestry Code are high, as well as in areas where artisanal mining occurs. The latter is a sector that is for all intents and purposes totally unregulated and unpoliced.
Because our model for fighting corruption is predicated on being both client driven and at the same time, highly collaborative with outside technical assistance providers, the demand for this model could be appropriate in countries with traditions of highly participatory decentralized governance structures. Sahelian countires such as Mali and Senegal could be future sources of demand, as could a country like Madagascar.
Scaling up Strategy
Our priority for the next three years is the replication of our model for combating corruption in areas within the DRC where we have yet to work, and in other countries in the sub-region such as the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Central African Republic (CAR) and potentially the other countries in the CICOS member states which include Cameroon, and to be Angola and Chad.
The reason for identifying this as a priority is because (a) the model is perceived in the DRC as highly successful and worth of replication by an array of Congolese stakeholders (b) the government of the DRC, in particular recently elected President Kabila and his Prime Minister and Minister of Interior, have been outspoken in support of anti-corruption programming, offering hope that the GDRC is positioning itself to make this an operational priority, taking it beyond what heretofore has been a rhetorical level.
We also are optimistic that our partnership with CICOS will open doors for scaling up our activity in the ROC and CAR, as corruption is strangling the Oubangi and Sangha river systems. For CAR this is a particularly acute problem, as they are entirely landlocked otherwise.
Linked to this priority is an awareness raising program for potential sources of funding in the donor community, as well as technical partners. Of note in this regard, we have opened discussions with the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID), the UNDP, as well as the U.S. Department of State, Transparency International, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), or Chatham House. With increasing global awareness of the constraining role that corruption plays in all development sectors, and with our model being one of the few field tested and proven approaches in Africa, we are optimistic that uor strategy will resonate with new partners in the coming year.
Stage of the initiative
1
Expansion plan
Our expansion plan is to use awareness raising, outreach to potential partners, and continued bridge building with government, elected parliamentarians, and our traditional civil society constituencies, to signal interested donor partners that our model is ready for broad up-scaling in the DRC and the sub-region. With five years of testing and demonstration under our belts in a variety of urban and rural settings across the DRC, we know very well what works and what does not work in terms of strategy and approach, as well as specific activities. This experience and strong set of lessons learned needs to be capitalized upon now while we are still very active in the field. Our plan is to use the remaining five months of our field program in the DRC to maximize outreach and awareness of the program within the GDRC, to seek ourt synergies with other governments in the sub-region who have expressed interest in the model, and to determine what external partners would be interested in working with us. The World Bank has has made loud noise about its interest to support anti-corruption programming, as has DFID and its implementing partner UNDP. We will reach out to those groups, and will of course continue to work with our principal partner USAID as opportunity avails itself.
We also are keen to focus more attention on corruption in areas where extractive industries are active. This includes the forestry and mining sectors, as well as the unofficial artisanal mining sectors.
Origin of the Initiative
The initiative began when we were approached about a request or proposals from USAID to fight corruption in Bandundu and Equateur provinces in the DRC. Frankly, I was hesitant (scared) at the thought of tackling this in the DRC of 2002. The country was still in civil war, and while the areas we were working in were at the edge of the conflict zone, there was no visible presence of government services that were defending citizen rights. On the contrary, government presence was by and large predatory.
It turns out we were the only organization to bid on this project. While we did not perceive ourselves then as having all the skills to combat corruption in a country still in conflict, we felt we had a viable strategy and did have the experience in the provinces. We also had the courage to move forward. Our decision proved to be correct, as this is now one of our flagship programs.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
Main Obstacles to Scaling Up
On the surface, in our case the main obstacle to scaling appears to be financial. Yet this would be overly simplistic to cite as the sole option for in fact, while everyone who knows anything about our program is frankly, impressed by it, few outside USAID have expressed willingness to put up funds to support scaling up. Why? I believe this is because (a) donors are so obsessed with fighting grand corruption that they do not think strategically about how a “pincered” approach to combating corruption driven bottom up could most logically meet some other top-down strategy and thus, they lose the opportunity to do so (b) the democracy and governance community has long written about fighting corruption, but there really is very limited hands-on experience and what is required is thus not appreciated. This leads people to assume either that anyone can just go and fight corruption or else, that they just do not have enough information to invest yet. In both instances, this leads to less investment in a proven hands-on approach like our’s which is ready for major upscaling.
Main Financial Challenges
In five years our activity has spent a total of $3.3 million over five years. Arbitrarily assuming impact on 400,000 people conservatively, this translates to a cost of $8.25 per beneficiary. Using conservative estimates in section 15 above, the cost per beneficiary ratio comes down dramatically.
We have proven that we are capable of operating on a “shoestring” in five provinces at a time – in $500,000 annual increments. Objectively, we believe that a $2M annual budget would likely be enough to achieve immediate “tipping points” as defined by changed stakeholder behaviours leading to sustainable decreases in corruption and its impacts.
We imagine that this type of program will continue to be financed in the short-term by multilateral and bilateral donors. In our opinion, it is an arena of relevance to major private sector operators – mining companies, hydropower companies, logging companies etc., as public relations issues will only amplify in the coming years due to the availability of decentralized communications technologies (cellphones and email) in remote areas, coupled to enhance awareness of citizen rights, coupled to decentralized governance prerogatives.
Main Partnership Challenges
Our main partnership challenges have been touched upon above. Convincing donors who are on the one hand interested, but on the other hand timid to get involved remains challenging. So too, the preoccupation with most donors of grand corruption (versus the strategic identification of bottom up combat of administrative corruption to generate momentum to address grand corruption) remains a constraint challenge to our ability to successfully scale up our program.
We know who many potential partners could be, but these partners have yet to decide how they propose to combat corruption hands on on the ground. So too, the utter lack of donor coordination in central Africa leads to a situation where the wheel will surely be reinvented with each donor; while our program is known by others, each donor tends to wish to develop their own approach (to governance writ large in this case) with their own stable of implementing agencies. Breaking in with new donors in an environment where everyone refers to coordination and lessons learned, but where this rarely translates into innovative collaboration, is very challenging.
Awareness raising and reaching out to possible partners is thus crucial.
How did you hear about this contest and what is your main incentive to participate?
I read about this in The Drum Beat. Our incentive to participate is twofold: (1) get the word out on our innovative initiative that we feel represents a model for successfully combating corruption in Central Africa (2) offer an opportunity to interface with potential technical and financial partners
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Comments
This is indeed an interesting model. The proposal would be strengthened by addressing the following points. First, it would be helpful to have more information and examples of what specifically the CLATS have done to combat corruption. Also, is the main focus on corruption related to river transport, such as illegal tariffs and checkpoints? Another question is this: Whose idea was this originally? Did USAID come up with the concept and contract out the implementation, or was the idea put forward by Congolese groups, perhaps in response to a general solicitation? Related to this, is the activity sustainable, i.e. what evidence is there to show that it will continue and evolve when it is no longer funded and perhaps driven by USAID?
Thanks Patrick. To fill in some of the information gaps, the most active CLATs continue to denounce corruption in ports, on waterways, and increasingly in remote terrestrial areas of the "catchment areas" they serve. Most of the early work of the CLATs targetted illegal activities along rivers and principal tributaries paralyzing both rural production and commerce. Now, the corruption that is addressed by CLATs has broadened considerably, and is not only related to illicit rents sought and gained, and physical shakedowns for money. Much of the watchdogging in provinces now involves apparent sexual assaults on women, acts of impunity by people in power in areas where their is no government internal oversight, particularly where the military is concerned. It also is increasingly addressing lack of transparency and collusion in the logging and mining sectors. AS the DRC is one of the workld's most well endowed countries from the perspective of mineral, water and forest resources, CLATs involvement in corruption and conflict in areas where mining and logging occur is of utmost relevance to the short- and medium term development prospects of the DRC.
Some CLATs have succeeded in getting soldiers who have committed rape, or been accused and proven of illegal beatings, thrown in jail and brought before the Congolese military tribunal. Recently CLATs from far eastern Equateur wrote to the presidency complaining of public administrative corruption and collusion with logging companies not respecting either the forest code or their agreements with communities for what constitutes sustainable logging practices in community forests where harvesting agreements had been negotiated.
USAID deserves the credit for this idea.
One of the ironies of development is in honestly saying that, it somehow denigrates that this was not a "bottom up" achievement. For those aware of the history of the DRC over the past 30 years, while there have been many small scale bottom up achievements in rural areas promoted by church groups in particular, along with womens and producer groups, all a function of state negligence obligating the grassroots to operate for its own survival, creating a movement to combat culturally condoned and perpetuated corruption was not one of these achievements. USAID had a good idea, they created what is known as an Annual Program Statement which is a procurement mechanism enabling submittors to be as creative as they wish in response to a problem or issue. The response we crafted was out best effort to address what we perceived to be the most serious constraint to development in the DRC.
On the question of sustainability, as I said in the submission, we are trying now to enable CLATs to obtain the analytical and negotiation skills to sustain activities within the context of decentralized governance opportunities that the new Constitution to the DRC enableas.
For the time being, donors and private investors remain hesitant to invest in the DRC for numerous reasons, corruption and lack of transparency being high up on the list. IRM feels that the groups we have been working with are receiving basic, yet strong skills, to enable them to sustain their activities. At some point however, outside interests will need to invest in them, if watchdogging and progressively, participation in decentralized governance at territorial and sectoral levels is to occur. Will CLATs be perceived by potential external partners as interesting loci to invest in? Who can be sure but if it were me looking at the rural Congolese landscape, I might bet on a good number of these CLATs prior to wagering on other entitites operating on different codes of ethics and action plans.
AS of now, USAID plans to end suport to CLATs on September 30, 2007. A new set of USAID program priorities is emerging. A new competitve bidding process is being formulated. We continue on our own to seek out other potential partners to enable CLATs to surpass the critical threshold at which capacities have been strengthened to the point where CLAT programming can become sustinable. In the case of approximately 50 of the more prominent CLATs, we are not too far away from crossing this threshold.
Hello,
My name is Rich Gottbreht from Global Insights and I am one of the entrants in the competition. Our work centers on helping anyone concerned about corruption learn about the subject through my book, our board game and its associated seminars, as well as low cost consulting. To find out more about us please visit our website www.globalinsights.biz. From the home page, you can link to information about us, our products and what people say about our products and services. From the details in the initiative we submitted you should also note that some of the proceeds from our sales will eventually go to a high integrity leadership development foundation. Also, if you are interested, down the road we will be looking for alliances and contacts in every country.
Thanks,
Rich Gottbreht
Thanks very much Rich for the input.
Given the experience of Global Insights, it would have been wonderful to have received some specific critique of what we do in our anti-corruption work, as a lot of information has been transparently laid out there.
I appreciate, believe me, the need to generate new business, through sale of your products and services. I'd suggest that the best way of achieving that in this forum might be through simply participating in a direct way by addressing the case studies at hand, versus futuristic marketing.
Innovative Resources Management also does consulting and provides technical and institutional capacity building. But in the context of this competition a direct critique, negative or positive in the spirit of advancing understanding, would also be great.
Excuse me if this seems too direct, but I believe this is what this competition was meant to be about.
Michael