Leveraging civil society to combat corruption risks in emergency response management: the COVID-19 experience
Governments and multilateral banks have spent unprecedented amounts of public money on the COVID-19 response. As with other public emergencies, this was no black swan event, as these loans brought increased vulnerability to corruption in public procurement and spending. Around US$455 billion is lost to corruption in the health sector globally every year, with the procurement phase being one of the areas that is most vulnerable to corruption risks. Public health emergencies, through the increased “urgency of needs, required flexibility and requested speed”, significantly exacerbate the corruption risks in procurement. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Transparency International clarified why procurement corruption costs lives when public funds and resources intended to benefit people’s lives and improve public services are siphoned off from their proper use. More specifically, lax procurement rules and regulations, a lack of medical supplies to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, and rushed public tenders allowing third parties to bid to supply medical equipment all had a negative impact on the quality of the selected bidders and service delivery and increased the risk of public resources being exposed to corruption. Added to this context, the pandemic revealed an increased level of undue influence from companies with close connections to national governments resulting in price gouging. Further, as reported by some Transparency International chapters6, increased restriction of access to information laws and freedom of information requests from civil society have adversely affected civic oversight of how public funds have been used in governments’ COVID-19 response. Against this backdrop, the Transparency International secretariat, in collaboration with its 10 national chapters, implemented the Adaptive, Risk-Based Approaches to Anti-Corruption in Covid-19 responses (ARBAC-19) project over the course of the past two-and-a-half years. The project aimed to identify, respond and follow up on the corruption risks in emergency response funding through tailor-made anti-corruption measures at national and international levels. This best practice report has been compiled to share the findings from the ARBAC-19 project and the chapters that took part. It presents three best practice case studies and makes global policy recommendations with a view to improving future pandemic and emergency responses. The report provides innovative approaches, tools and methods in assisting and guiding the Transparency International movement and other civil society organisations (CSOs) working in the field of anti-corruption. It evaluates the corruption risks stemming from a public emergency context, with stories and resources developed by 10 chapters involved in the ARBAC-19 project. These diverse chapters were selected from the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Central Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa regions. In the next section, we present the research, good practices and cases identified by the 10 chapters, and describe broader global trends and findings. A case studies section then presents cases from six chapters on topics related to open data and access to information, local action and civic engagement, and the role of investigative journalism in identifying abuse and attempted misuse of COVID-19 related public funds.
