Over the past two days I have blogged about the contrasting trust relationships we NGOs have with communities and donors, how important they are, and yet how frequently they fall short. Both, however, are wonders of mutual respect and cooperation compared to the relationship we have with government. I think it is hard for anyone [...]
Posts Tagged ‘corruption’
5 Sep
In praise of hand-wringing
Let’s not give Libya an anti-corruption commission, says Nathaniel Heller.* (Not, of course, that we’d be actually ‘giving’ it …) I could give my own reasons to go alongside Nathaniel’s. (How do you stop the anti-corruption guys themselves being corrupted? Is the political will really there to eliminate graft wholesale, or only those bits which [...]
23 May
Sleeping with the Enemy
What do you do if you know a friend of yours is a crook? You might not have any actual evidence, but you know it for sure, and you could easily gather the necessary evidence without putting yourself to much effort. You also know that the authorities are rather plodding and/or in league with them, [...]
11 Mar
The psychology of giving and the corruption double whammy
An excellent post by William Savedoff and Nancy Birdsall over at GCD on Cash on Delivery aid got me thinking. Talking about proposed preconditions to successful COD aid they say: “Similarly, conditioning a contract on adequate financial controls assumes that it is better to control the use of funds by tracking where they go than [...]
28 Feb
About as bad as it gets
A $380 million yacht for a dictator’s son? Equally eye-popping was Obiang’s justification of his and political elites’ wealth: In a sworn affidavit to a South African court … He stated that public officials in his country are allowed to partner with foreign companies bidding for government contracts and said this means “a Cabinet minister [...]
27 Sep
Development Thought for the Day
New roads (or at least newly surfaced roads) are a staple of development, e.g. this, and with good reason since they reduce barriers to market access and catalyse economic growth. Unfortunately, round here, after a few years, many new roads start to crumple into corrugations, subside around bridges and develop potholes. Two causes are blamed: [...]
