fix-rate of more than 80 per cent and it has been able to redress problems in 281 projects across five provinces over the past two years. Integrity Action’s partners in Nepal and Timor Leste have monitored eight and 15 projects, respectively. These numbers are considerably lower but they remain meaningful results for organisations that have embarked on this approach more recently and with modest initial resources. Integrity Action worked with IWA from its inception in 2006 and the organisation has had a few years head start over the others. The multitude of new infrastructure projects built in Afghanistan through foreign aid in the last few years has also made this country particularly well suited to monitoring at scale, despite the challenges posed by the rampant nature of corruption in the country and the ongoing threat of violence. A critic may argue that the fix-rate needs to be weighted; otherwise fixing small, relatively easy problems that only affect a few people might be given the same weight as the fix of a problem that affects thousands in a project costing millions. There are three ways of responding to this concern: 1. The self-reinforcing credibility test: Fix-rates should always be reported in conjunction with other numbers, say, the value of projects being monitored, the number of intended beneficiaries of a service and the number of problems that were identified. The most important fix for an anti-corruption agency in a country where corruption is rife is likely to be the conviction rate (it may also report on the size of financial settlements or the amount of repatriated funds). If the anti-corruption agency only catches and secures sentences against ‘small fish’ it will not be nearly as credible as an agency in a neighbouring country that has secured a number of high profile convictions (all the more so if they are for people from or close to the political party in power). Similarly, an NGO that achieves fixes through Community Integrity Building for projects that affect tens of thousands of people will naturally be more credible than an NGO that only focuses on minor, easily repaired projects 2. A bar can be set: An NGO or a government agency working on Community Integrity Building could decide that it will set a threshold and only tackle projects that reach at least ten thousand people or projects with a minimum value of $50,000. Such a threshold would have an immediate impact on scale. In anti-corruption agencies, such thresholds are quite common 3. Small changes do matter: In Kenya, for example, the rate of sexual abuse by male teachers of their students has become notorious. A volunteer community monitor trained through Integrity Action’s work decided singlehandedly that the time had come to confront and bring a teacher to justice whom the police and Ministry of Education had previously refused to pursue, even after several complaints from the community. Despite Me a s u r i n g t r a n s p a r e n c y a n d a c c o u n t a b i l i t y wo r k : T h e f i x - r a t e resistance from the local police who were relatives of the teacher, and the teacher fleeing from the community, the monitor was ultimately successful and the teacher was caught, tried and ultimately sentenced to several years’ imprisonment. Changes that only affect a few people do matter, especially for the weak and marginalised. In fact, the basic test of the strength and integrity of a fix – and therefore of the methods and institutions that produce the fix – is that it empowers those who are weak and poor As the quality of public services and governance improves and corruption is reduced one would expect the fix-rate to rise. While this may sound counter-intuitive, a high fix-rate is the hallmark of a system that works. It is the rate of problems that needs to be low, not the fix-rate. One would not expect – nor wish – the public sector to be entirely error free, because of the dystopian connotations this would invariably imply, but the main point is that an improvement in fix-rates is generally a good sign. Achieving fixes is not the ultimate aim or objective of a project. Improved roads, garbage collection and schools are the intended outcome. But the fix-rate is a powerful intermediate variable that signals why and how change is happening. Without such information, it is nearly impossible to fine-tune policies or to assess whether they are actually contributing to meaningful change on the ground. Endnotes 1 When Oby Ezekwesili set up the new federal procurement control unit in the President’s Office in Nigeria in the early 2000s, she reduced costs by 40 to 50 per cent. Similar reductions were noted in Italy after the Mani Pulite anticorruption drive disrupted corrupt networks in the early 1990s. For a review of some issues related to construction, see Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, ‘The Economic Costs of Corruption in Infrastructure’, ‘Global Corruption Report 2005: Corruption in Construction and Post-Conflict Reconstruction’, Transparency International, Berlin: pp. 12–19. For an excellent typology and analysis of corruption in global infrastructure see giaccentre.org/cost_of_corruption.php. Data from the US provides another benchmark for potential losses due to corruption and fraud: the US Department of Health and Human Services estimates Medicare fraud at seven to 14 per cent of all reimbursements in 2000, from David Becker et al. ‘Detecting Medicare Abuse’, NBER Working Paper Series, No 10677, August 2004. By 2010 such losses were estimated at $48 billion in a single fiscal year (see US Government Accountability Office, ‘Medicare and Medicaid fraud, waste and abuse: Effective implementation of recent laws and agency actions could help reduce improper payments’, Testimony Before the Sub-committee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security, Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, US Senate, 9 March 2011). 2 The organisation was founded as Tiri: Making Integrity Work and was re-branded as Integrity Action in October 2012. Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2013/14 69
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