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CORRUPTION: Where Civil Society Found Inspiring Success

Sanjay Suri

GLASGOW, May 24 2007 (IPS) - Some retired engineers in the Pakistani port city Karachi figured they’d had enough of corruption in the awarding of contracts. They found support from the Partnership for Transparency Fund, no more then 23,000 dollars, to do no more than watch a process of awarding of contracts in a 100 million dollar project of the Karachi Water & Sewerage Board.

Some retired engineers in the Pakistani port city Karachi figured they’d had enough of corruption in the awarding of contracts. They found support from the Partnership for Transparency Fund, no more then 23,000 dollars, to do no more than watch a process of awarding of contracts in a 100 million dollar project of the Karachi Water & Sewerage Board.

It worked. In that first round of eight million dollars of the project, two to three million dollars were saved. “An investment of just about 20,000 dollars saved millions in a very short time,” Pierre Landell-Mills from the Partnership for Transparency Fund (PTF) told a small workshop at the Civicus world assembly under way in Glasgow Thursday.

It worked in Karachi – and this kind of approach worked again and again.

In Uganda groups tracked education budgets to see if schools were getting the money they were intended to. In Bulgaria experts were paid little more than hotel costs to watch a telecom auction process. The result: transparency leading to a substantial lowering of cost.

“Reform usually takes a very long time,” Landell-Mills said. But it is possible with a small amount of money to make a dramatic difference. Small steps can make for big changes.”

The Partnership for Transparency Fund has so far given out 60 grants in 25 countries for such work, each grant of less than 25,000 dollars. “Two-thirds of these have been successful,” Landell-Mills said. And it has been a success of monitoring, “of simply seeing what is going on.”

The watching business – of business which others see as theirs – is catching on. In Latvia a group is watching the construction of a 270-million dollar library building. In the Philippines all sorts of civil society groups have begun to keep an eye on projects and contracts following a path-breaking project of pursuing the delivery of school textbooks.

A project following delivery of textbooks in 2001 found a 40 percent shortfall in books getting to classrooms. The project by Ateneo University found later in 2003 that 21 percent books were not being delivered to schools difficult to reach.

“So we decided to track the delivery,” said Dondon Parafina from the university. Not that easy, given that 64 million textbooks at a cost of 52 million dollars would have to be tracked at anything from 4,500 to 8,000 points.

So other civil society groups joined in – Christian groups, Islamic groups, youth groups – they all offered volunteers to do the tracking. The result? Now fewer than five percent of books go missing.

And the schools hard to reach? “We were told that those places are hard to get to, but when we got there, we found they all have Coca Cola,” said Parafina. “So the Coca Cola trucks took our books there.”

That was asking for some controversy – and they got it. “We faced criticism that we are endorsing a particular product,” said Parafina. “And we were told Coca Cola is not good for children. But then maybe this was corporate social responsibility, that they let us use their logistical strength.”

Success, then, but success in tracking school textbooks, and in monitoring contracts here and there. Not in cracking the big corruption, those arms deals and oil deals that are worth billions, and where the corruption is big proportionately.

But in the little successes could lie the seed of bigger ones. “We have had a real ripple effect in the Philippines where the small successes are making a big impact,” said Parafina. “Similar moves have now begun for public works, for the procurement of medicines, for World Bank funded projects. Our work with the school textbooks has had some unintended consequences.”

The small successes are in the first place not so small. And they could be creating an environment now in which the bigger success can take appear.

The Partnership for Transparency Fund is itself getting bigger. “We are gearing up now for a much bigger programme,” Landell-Mills said. The Fund, which has been supported by the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank and some other institutions, now expects to receive substantial new grants from Britain’s Department for International Development.

“This year we are doing 20 projects, we hope to take that soon to about 40 to 50 a year,” Landell-Mills said. And it will happen through working with institutions, and with people within who want to see the right thing done.

But quite the biggest capital for this enterprise is people, said Parafina. “Citizens are ready to help. You just need to provide a channel.”

In those recovered school textbooks could lie a lesson, in time, for the untouched players of those arms and oil deals.