Integrity Action seeks to improve public services and infrastructure development in low income countries by utilizing the most effective measures to mitigate corruption. It does so primarily through two core programs which it believes are the most impactful for decreasing corruption. These programs are Community Integrity Building and Integrity Education. Integrity Action claims excellent success with these strategies and wants them to be adopted more broadly and become standard in international aid.

Community Integrity Building

Community Integrity Building refers to a collaboration between the government and the community. Community volunteers learn their rights and entitlements, form working groups with government, monitor government activity, provide feedback to government and the wider community, and demand any shortcomings be corrected. When Integrity Action helps to form a CIB, government corruption in that area tends to go down significantly and public services are improved because it closes the loop in the relationship between government and its citizens. Community Integrity Building is a proactive form of corruption mitigation which utilizes continuous communication between citizenry and government to resolve issues as they arise in a friendly, non-confrontational fashion, rather than taking the traditional judicial route in which people suspected of corruption are prosecuted.

Integrity Education

Integrity education trains people to act with integrity and demand integrity of others. It is offered to leaders in government, nonprofits, and business, as well as students. IA has founded the Integrity Education Network, a network of over 400 universities, institutions, and NGOs that teach integrity. They also developed a curriculum and training materials for integrity education and provide consultation.

Integrity Action focuses on these two main strategies that they developed to fight corruption because they feel they have the most potential in an otherwise low tractability field. IA claims that their Community Integrity Building improves public service delivery discrepancies by an average of 50%. This is a strikingly high success rate considering that even robust anti-corruption reforms in general have little to no impact. They also claim that lasting, transformative progress in lowering corruption can only be achieved with integrity education.

Cost-Effectiveness

Integrity Action estimates that effective Community Integrity Building costs 1% of the budget the government program that is being monitored. At an average Fix Rate of 50%, that is an incredible return on investment. For instance, if a program is losing 30% of its funds to corruption, and CIB halves the level of corruption in the program down to 15%, that is a 15-fold return.

CIB for infrastructure projects has an average Fix Rate of 80%. At a 50% level of corruption for an infrastructure development initiative, an 80% correction would decrease the corruption level down to 10% — a 40-fold return on investment!

It is hard to measure the effectiveness of Integrity Education.

Room for More Funding

Integrity Action received £1.2 million in donations in 2016, which is $1.6 million USD. Their community monitors are currently monitoring development projects worth around $900 million. IA’s programs would be useful throughout the developing world, so they have seemingly limitless room to scale up. Their room for more funding is in the billions of dollars per year.

Integrity Action only accepts donations from governments and major foundations. However, it lists its local partners on its website, most of which accept donations more liberally.

Conclusion

CEAS believes that government corruption is probably the most important social issue in the world, because it is at the heart of so many social problems. In poor countries in particular, corruption in public services results in citizens being neglected and powerfully stifles social and economic progress. Over a trillion dollars is lost to this form of corruption each year. Most anti-corruption measures have had very disappointing results, with a few isolated success stories.  Integrity Action appears to deliver the most effective interventions at decreasing corruption. They can be utilized anywhere in the world. If large providers of official development assistance like the World Bank and USAID integrate Community Integrity Building into their grants, it can be scaled up very quickly.