Crosspost: How Weak Multilateral Lending Standards Enable and Strengthen Kleptocracy (orig. NED’s Democracy’s Power 3.0 blog)

We don’t usually crosspost but this recent piece by my colleague Elsa Peraldi, published last week on the National Endowment for Democracy’s Power 3.0 blog, warrants an exception: In her post about IMF emergency lending to Equatorial Guinea, Elsa highlights a key tension—a recurring systemic failure—of how our multilateral development system and the financial flows…

An Aggravated Struggle: Kleptocracy and COVID-19

Can humane stories help fight kleptocrats in power in Central Africa? Absolutely, is what the Central African Coalition Against Kleptocracy would say.  The Coalition, which includes activists from Cameroon, Chad, Congo and Equatorial Guinea, believes that sharing stories on how citizens are affected by kleptocrats is an important step in raising awareness, and eventually fighting…

Marking milestones in understanding the presence of corruption and the role of integrity among South African and Zambian urban planning professionals

One year further into its GI ACE-supported research concerning the role of integrity and corruption within the planning profession in Zambia and South Africa, the African Centre for Cities’ “Cities of Integrity” (COI) research team has hit new milestones and made progress in achieving its research objectives. Since publishing its first working paper, covered in…

ACE: Exploring New Ways to develop effective anti-corruption interventions

The Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) program, funded with UK aid from the UK government in a £15 million investment from 2015–2021, is designed to produce new, relevant research evidence on tackling corruption. Despite decades of global anti-corruption initiatives, the track record of such efforts has been disappointing. It is now widely accepted that technocratic, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches…