Simple ways to fight corruption. By Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative. What is corruption? Who does it affect? As the biggest obstacle to economic and social development it harms societies in these ways: It undermines democracy and human rights by weakening governments. It diverts funds from public services such as health care, education, and sanitation.
It discourages foreign investment, leading to fewer jobs. You can make a difference Powerful people are often the ones taking bribes or making shady deals, and that discourages honest citizens with few resources.
Transparency International offers these ideas in its anti-corruption kit: Organize a committee to count and keep track of public supplies, such as school textbooks. Coordinate a sporting event that the community can participate in to raise awareness of corruption. Create a petition and take it to the decision-makers. A world free from corruption is critical to the strengthening of the rule of law, achieving the ends of justice and ensuring the advancement of core fundamental principles of a just society, including a fair state of play, integrity, transparency and objectivity in both the public and private sectors.
But to be truly transformative, efforts to end global corruption and achieve sustainable development must have at their core the full participation and involvement, at all stages, of young people.
As the next generation of political and business leaders, civil servants, educators and community workers, the young represent the fundamental fabric of society. We will need their engagement to achieve the three key ways to curb corruption set forth below, and to ensure the generational advancement of the global community towards a better world.
It is absolutely essential that greater attention be placed on the need for comprehensive education for the future generation. Such efforts would involve ensuring that school and university curricula are updated and modernized in line with societal changes and developments to reinforce positive ideas and societal values for future generations and protect vulnerable groups of children.
These efforts also require us to ensure that all children have adequate access to education, proper transportation and facilities, and necessary government and community support. An emphasis on education, however, is not limited to only the formal school or university setting. It includes the holistic education of the next generation through community and religious institutions, vocational and internship opportunities, and participation in public and political processes as an integral part of socialization and development.
Such an approach would be more likely to bridge the gap between the younger generation and political institutions that represent and serve their interests, fostering more productive relationships and more open dialogue. While such a culture can be fostered and advanced through the comprehensive education of the next generation discussed previously, there is no reason to limit such efforts to only young people. Civil servants, political leaders and private-sector actors — both individually and collectively — can immediately begin establishing and strengthening a culture of integrity that concentrates on high-quality service delivery and professional performance standards, treating individuals with respect and dignity, and — above all else — playing by the same rules of fairness and objectivity.
To paraphrase the author Robert Fulghum , such wisdom is not to be found on the top of the graduate school mountain, but in the sandpile at elementary school. For any society to be successful at curbing corruption and sustaining a culture of integrity, there must be mechanisms in place that operate as a check on thinking or behaviour that would represent a backsliding to the previous corrupt ways of doing business in the public or private sectors.
Such monitoring and oversight helps to positively reinforce integrity and professionalism while holding accountable those who choose to violate the positive societal norms. In order to create such institutions, however, it is up to the public to demand accountability from their political leaders, civil servants and private-sector actors.
In order to test the question, they examined five years of unpaid parking tickets in New York City that were associated with cars driven by foreign diplomats who worked at the United Nations. Lee Kuan Yew believed that if you introduced tough penalties for corruption you could curb behavior.
Fisman and Miguel sought to test the opposite hypothesis: who, in the absence of any legal penalty—the diplomats enjoyed immunity and would never be punished for failure to pay parking tickets—would pay, rather than abuse this prerogative? They discovered that diplomats from some countries had no unpaid parking tickets, whereas diplomats from other countries had many.
In a single year, one fellow accumulated five hundred and twenty-six unpaid tickets. He was from Kuwait. Using a corruption index from the World Bank, the economists correlated these results with levels of corruption in the relevant nations.
Diplomats from countries where corruption tends to be high were very likely to generate unpaid parking tickets; those from countries where corruption was low tended, if they racked up tickets at all, to pay them. The Norwegians, needless to say, were without blemish. If you take a Norwegian out of Norway, her respect for the law may tell you less about some deep, immutable cultural DNA than about a series of civic reflexes that she has been taught as a citizen of Norway.
Noonan notes, in his history of bribery, that while some amount of corrupt behavior may be a constant feature across cultures and across historical epochs, a certain moral revulsion toward corruption is just as common: even in nations where bribery is part of daily life it tends to be publicly frowned upon, and is almost always at least technically illegal.
Noonan likens corrupt behavior to another human practice that is no less widespread for all the moral and religious opprobrium—sex. To the jaded expats of Kabul, an easy cultural essentialism suggested that Afghans simply like corruption, that it is the way they have always done things.
But in her workshop Chayes heard something different. In the face of flagrant misappropriation, she found, ordinary citizens could experience a sense of grievance so potent that it filled them with something worse than anger—a desire for revenge. Nurallah, an employee at the factory who once worked as a police officer, told her about the humiliation that his brother experienced during a shakedown by Afghan police. All those bribes and kickbacks radicalized the local population, turning it against the Afghan government and, at least some of the time, toward the Taliban.
Chayes cites a survey conducted by U. The notion that U. Good governance is often construed as an essentially humanitarian preoccupation, a civil-society concern that is forever trumped by more pressing strategic obligations. In unstable and potentially explosive places like Afghanistan, she argues, the dilemma of corruption is not, as it might appear, one in which American values and interests are in tension.
When Barack Obama was elected President in , Chayes saw an opportunity to make her case for a reconsideration of the importance of Afghan corruption, and travelled to Washington. Her revelation about the threat that venality poses to national security had provided her with a mode of argument that might prove persuasive with a critical audience—the military.
As Chayes made her case that coalition forces should recalibrate their priorities in Afghanistan, Mullen opened a spiral notebook and took notes. At the end of the meeting, he inquired, with concern, about her personal safety. Mullen took Chayes on as an adviser. The United States was in the process of shifting its military strategy in Afghanistan to focus on counterinsurgency, one element of which was an effort to promote good governance so as not to further alienate the Afghan population.
As the Arab Spring began, Chayes travelled to Tunisia, Egypt, and other regional hot spots, taking inventory of the popular antipathy toward kleptocratic regimes and the ways in which it could spark revolt.
What are we to make of all those corrupt African despots whose greed prompted no religious extremism? Or of Russia, for that matter, where vast wealth has been expropriated by a handful of oligarchs and bureaucrats without stirring widespread disaffection?
But, now that Chayes could get people to care about corruption, there remained the question of what they could do about it. If you want to turn Afghanistan into Singapore, where do you start? With her access to military decision-makers in Kabul, Chayes suggested a series of practical reforms: Washington could be more discriminating about its partnerships in Afghanistan; local officials and power brokers who were known to be corrupt should be isolated; and U.
But any time she proposed measures that might antagonize President Karzai and his circle she encountered resistance; the perception among American officials in Kabul, both military and civilian, was that these were partners in the fight against the Taliban, and the United States could not afford to alienate them. Even so, with American assistance, Afghan prosecutors prepared a test case against a Karzai aide named Muhammed Zia Salehi, who had been captured on a wiretap soliciting a bribe.
As soon as he was arrested, Salehi telephoned Karzai, and was promptly released; the prosecutor who indicted him was investigated and later fired. When Chayes tried to generate a blacklist of especially nefarious Afghans, her efforts were blocked, because, she implies, the Central Intelligence Agency appeared to be making payments to multiple people on the list.
The Times revealed in that the agency had been delivering clandestine bags of cash directly to the offices of President Karzai, and the paymaster in this operation turned out to be none other than Salehi. Little wonder the President released him so quickly. When Chayes watched Ahmed Wali Karzai take those packages of money back in , the people handing him the money were American spies.
In practice, though, even investigations of relatively minor players produced fierce reactions from more senior Afghan officials.
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