Preventing Corruption in Humanitarian Assistance

Abstract

"This report describes research on the problem of corruption in human assistance carried out in 2007 and 2008 by the Feinstein International Center of Tufts University (FIC) in collaboration with the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) at the Overseas Development Institute in London (ODI) and the sponsoring Organization, Transparency International (TI). Seven major international humanitarian NGOs volunteered to be part of the project and allowed researchers access to their headquaters staff and documentation along with similar access to field programs in seven crisis affected countries.The research does not try to assess the degree of corruption in any one agency or country. Rather it seeks to document perceptions of corruption in humanitarian operations, including the context of humanitarian assistance, the risks and consequences of corruption, the policies and practices to mitigate or manage corruption risks, and remaining gaps in addressing corruption. This report provides some examples of prevalent corrupt practices and the range of measures the cooperating agencies are using to counter the temptation of corruption, guard operations against corruption and allow for its detection. It does not attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of these measures in reducing corruption. But more importantly, the research provides the basis for TI to develop a handbook of good practices in managing corruption risk and combating corrupt practices in humanitarian assistance, which will be issued in early 2009. This report is limited to the research findings. The research was carried out on the strict understanding that both individuals and agencies would remain anonymous. For this reason, the data presented in this main report are inaggregate form only. More detailed information has been fed back to the individual agency headquarters and field programs respectively. This report is necessarily void of some of the contextual details that might have compromised the identity of either individuals or agencies, and is deliberately limited to generic descriptions. This is not because t he study turned up any new cases of corruption – it did not, nor was it intended to – but rather to respect the confidentiality required to have an honest discussion with agency staff about corruption risks and their means of dealing with them. This analysis suggests that, in recent years, humanitarian agencies have become more aware of the risks of corruption and have taken many steps to deal with these risks. However, there are remaining gaps that could be addressed both by better sharing of good practices within the humanitarian community, and by looking to good examples from outside of it. Also, many of the mechanisms agencies use to track and control normal financial and human resource procedures along with program quality mechanism s can be used to mitigate the risk of corruption and counter it s effects. Agencies have put in place specific mechanisms to mitigate corruption risks, most notably “whistleblower” programs and strengthened internal audit functions. However, findings here suggest that the former are better known in headquarters than in field operations. These findings also suggest that many humanitarian workers have a narrow view of what constitutes corruption, seeing it primarily as a financial issue, rather than abuse of power. This report makes a series of recommendations as to how the humanitarian community might move forward to increase discussion of corruption issues, develop improved systems to mitigate risk and better ensure its detection. Based on findings from this study, recommendations to humanitaria: [...].", p.2 (Executive Summary).