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19 March 2015 – There is the need to make data transparent and open in achieving success in financing for development, especially for the implementation of the up-coming Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Dominic Sam, Ghana Country Director for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), said this here on Thursday in his opening remarks at the opening of a two-day UNDP and International Aid Transparency Initiative (AITI) regional workshop on data use.

According to him, Development Partners can only be effective when they can join forces in programming, avoiding duplication in projects to make efficient use of the limited financial resources available for development.
The Ghanaian government, UNDP and the IATI are jointly hosting the regional workshop which has brought together a range of actors and stakeholders in development cooperation.

Read the Xinhua story in Spy Ghana. http://www.spyghana.com/undp-calls-for-transparency-in-aid-and-development-resources/

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Addis Ababa, 4 March 2015 (ECA) – Public procurement systems in Africa have increasingly become a target for corrupt practices. Indeed, corruption in the procurement of public goods and services is a major obstacle to economic growth and development. The effects of corruption on the economy can be severe, including misallocation of scarce resources, reduction in the quality of services, increased cost of doing business, discouraging foreign investments as well as shrinking governments’ tax revenues. It is estimated that African countries lose about USD 148 billion per annum in corruption.

Public procurement for infrastructure has not been immune to corruption. The infrastructure sector has become more vulnerable to corruption from the public sector, but also the private sector. This poses a major concern for the continent’s structural transformation agenda as resources are misallocated for corrupt practices.

In line with its initiatives on combating corruption and improving governance in Africa, the Macroeconomic Policy Division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa is preparing a framework study on ‘Corruption in Public Procurement: the case of infrastructure in Africa’. This research study is part of the Regional Anti-Corruption Programme for Africa (RACPA), which started in 2011. The purpose of this framework study is to provide an updated assessment of the impact of corruption in public procurement in Africa. Specifically, the study seeks to show the negative effects of corruption in public procurement on Africa’s infrastructure development and propose policy recommendations accordingly.

This framework study highlights the public procurement systems in some African countries, key challenges and the legal and institutional reforms put in place by governments over the years. Based on best practices identified within and outside the region, recommendations will be proposed to policy-makers on how to address public procurement corruption in infrastructure.

Preliminary findings of the study have been debated at an Ad-hoc Expert Group Meeting held on 25th February 2015 and will further inform this research project. 

Source: http://www.uneca.org/media-centre/stories/corruption-public-procurement-case-infrastructure-africa#.VRP8lGYkhBI

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26 January 2015 – The United Nations main development programme spotlighted today its string of successes in 36 countries and territories in the Asia and Pacific region in the areas of poverty reduction, conservation of natural resources, democratic governance, and crisis resilience.

Launched by the UN Development Program (UNDP), the Asia-Pacific Regional Report Achieving Development Results in Asia and the Pacific highlights the accomplishments of programmes implemented in 2013 and 2014.

“The report documents the achievements of UNDP’s $2 billion delivery in the region during the past two years, focusing on key priority areas: innovative solutions to persistent development challenges and scaling up those solutions for greater impact,” UNDP Administrator’s Helen Clark said in a statement today.

Innovative solutions go hand-in-hand with efforts to strengthen local level partnerships, UNDP says. An example of that is the Programme’s work with Baidu, China’s largest internet service provider, to develop a mobile application to encourage responsible recycling of electronic waste.

“UNDP will strengthen partnerships and ensure that we are fit for purpose to continue achieving high quality results in the region,” said Haoliang Xu, UNDP Assistant Administrator and Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific.

With its programmes, UNDP also assisted people in strengthening livelihoods. From the help of governments and development partners, more than five million people now have access to social protection in the region, half of them women. Additionally, UNDP supported three million urban poor women and men in Bangladesh to gain financial security through loan schemes.

This is critical because economic empowerment is closely linked to the creation of community housing development funds and the various models of land tenure security, ensuring people are secure and can invest in their homes, UNDP said.

On crisis resilience, UNDP supported debris removal efforts, helped to restore social service centres and rebuild infrastructure following Typhoon Haiyan, the biggest natural disaster to hit the region in the two years. Since then, UNDP has been working with local and national authorities to improve early warning systems. The Philippines Government’s impressive preparatory action meant that the death toll from Typhoon Hagupit was just 18 as opposed to the 6,000 casualties after Haiyan.

In the area of strengthening democratic governance, UNDP provided electoral assistance which led to 16.7 million new registered voters across the region. In Bhutan, where it can take up to a week for parliamentarians to visit voters in remote areas, constituents can now interact with their parliamentarians virtually. And in the Maldives, selected community members are testing a new scheme to use mobile phones or log on to a website to report problems with public service delivery.

“It’s a new way for citizens to communicate with policy makers. According to a global survey responsive government is a key priority for more than three million people in the region as the post-2015 development agenda is being formulated,” said Nicholas Rosellini, the Director of UNDP’s Bangkok Regional Hub.

Source: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=49908

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Women are still far from being equally represented in the workplace in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Development projects have looked at promoting gender equality in the civil service yet little is known of the mechanisms that impact the careers and recruitment of women in bureaucracies.  In early 2014, UNDP Gender and Corruption teams joined hands to explore if and how transparency and accountability factors in the workplace were part of the equation when promoting gender equality in the region. Until then, if a stream of indicators and stories indicated that corruption had a gendered impact, little was known of its systematic effect on female civil servant’s career.

After nearly a year of four pilot surveys conducted in Albania, Kosovo[1], Kyrgyzstanand the Ukraine, what have we learned?

$               1. Perception of what constitutes corruption doesn’t vary much based on the respondent’s sex, but culture plays a crucial role in defining corrupt behaviors.

$          2. Access to information and transparency are the most relevant factors to take into account when looking at corruption dynamics impacting women’s careers, as its limits their access to trainings and networking opportunities, promotions and recruitments.

$           3. More work is needed with governments in the region to access human resources gender disaggregated data and be able to understand how and where corruption has played a role in promoting or impeding gender equality.

On specific results of the surveys and anti-corruption initiatives please see this full report available in English.

For more information on the anti-corruption initiatives check out this website.

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Corruption remains a major hurdle to human development in Asia and the Pacific, where strong national policies to tackle corruption are often faltering due to a lack of political will and poor coordination, says a new report published by the United Nations Development Programme today.

The report, released to coincide with the International Anti-Corruption Day, is titled Anti-Corruption Strategies: Understanding What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why?  

Anti-corruption strategies “often lack teeth when they are not fully integrated into national development plans,”the report notes as one of its critical findings.

Anchoring anti-corruption with national development plans is a pre-condition to encourage a whole-of-government approach for human development, it says.

Evidence shows that progress is slow in the region, with corruption remaining a major hurdle to development. Public sector corruption is perceived as significant in 64 percent of the countries in the region (Transparency International). And it is estimated that about 40 percent of investment in electricity, water and sanitation is lost to corruption.

According to the report, anti-corruption strategies have sometimes been mistaken as a generic roadmap that can be developed by a few bright minds in government to set overly ambitious goals.

The UNDP experience shows that it is essential to involve a wide range of actors to build ownership and ensure the effectiveness of strategies adopted.  This can reduce the vulnerability of reform efforts to changes in political leadership by empowering the public to monitor these commitments, the report observes.

This echoes the global call for “Breaking the corruption chain”, which is the main message of the International Anti-Corruption Day, globally observed every year on 9 December.

“On this year’s observance of the International Anti-Corruption Day, we call again on people everywhere to get involved in ‘Breaking the Corruption Chain’. Next year the world will agree a new post-2015 sustainable development agenda. Our aim is to empower individuals and catalyse governments, the private sector and civil society to help lift millions out of poverty, protect the planet and achieve shared prosperity and dignity for all. Eliminating corruption and its harmful impacts will be crucial to our future well-being,” says UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on 9 December 2014.

Another common pitfall of anti-corruption strategies is the lack of attention to implementation, monitoring and evaluation, says the report.

Government and development partners can be occasionally more concerned with drafting an anti-corruption strategy to fulfill international obligations under the UN Convention against corruption than with ensuring its implementation.

The report documents lessons learned from 14 countries, featuring Afghanistan, Australia, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Thailand and Viet Nam. It is a joint initiative of the UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub and the Global Anti-Corruption Initiative.

The report draws out five valuable lessons that can guide a country’s anti-corruption efforts:

1. Political changes are an opportunity and a challenge for the sustainability of anti-corruption strategies.
2. Measuring corruption is important, but only if governments make effective use of the results.
3. Regular data collection is an integral component of an anti-corruption strategy.
4. An anti-corruption agency is only as effective as the level of political support it enjoys from different branches of government.
5. Anti-corruption agencies in the region remain weak in monitoring and evaluating their strategies.

The report is available for download on UNDP Asia-Pacific website at http://on.undp.org/FvYyl.

Read The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message on International Anti-Corruption Day on 9 December 2014.  

For more information on the International Anti-Corruption Day, please visit www.anticorruptionday.org.

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