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Digital tools to fight corruption

November 30, 2016 at 7:53 pm

Bribery in the police system [publicdomainpictures/George Hodan]

Corruption has worsened in nine Arab countries since 2015, according to a recent study by Transparency International. Last year, one in three people who dealt with courts and one in four who dealt with police in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan, Tunisia and Yemen paid a bribe. Other forms of corruption include electoral fraud, nepotism, embezzlement and diversion of public resources.

Standing up against corruption in Arab countries is a particularly difficult task. There are very few protection laws for whistle-blowers in the region and two out of five people who report corruption suffer retaliation, according to Transparency International. Activists are turning to technology to ensure efficiency, safety and anonymity while tracking and reporting corruption.

“Technology can help the work of activists in many ways,” explains Vivek Srinivasan, manager of Stanford University’s Liberation Technology Programme, currently researching how mobile phones can be used against corruption. He gives the example of Tunisia where technology was used to expose the corrupt practices of the first lady.

“In 2007 a Tunisian activist posted a simple video online, tracking the president’s plane’s destinations, proving that it was being used by his wife for shopping trips in Europe. This was an effective use of technology to monitor the abuse of public funds.”

Srinivasan is course leader of Stanford University’s new massive open online course (MOOC) called “Technology for Accountability Lab”, available in English and Arabic. The only course of its kind, it has attracted 3,000 participants from around the world to study the monitoring of grassroots corruption, parliaments, elections, political funding and the private sector, as well as how to design human-centred transparency tools and how to tell stories with data.

“The goal of the course is twofold,” explains Srinivasan, “to engage traditional anti-corruption activists and help them imagine how technology can be used in their work and context; and to bring in engineers who have an interest in civic engagement.”

The course will be followed by a competition funded by the National Democratic Institute. Some 200 course participants will be selected for a mentorship programme, and teams from both the English and the Arabic versions of the course will then present their “civil tech” project through a bilingual video. The ten top submissions will see their team invited to Washington, DC and Silicon Valley to attend training and connect with tech companies, policymakers and activists.

This course may give skills, connections and momentum to would-be activists but, in several countries, young Arabs didn’t wait for a university course to start fighting corruption with technology. In Lebanon, an NGO called Sakker El Dekkene, established four years ago, allows users to record and report corruption incidents instantly and anonymously through its app and website.

“Before we started, no one could follow corruption incidents in the country,” explains Rabih Chaer, the NGO’s former president and now advisory board member. “Anti-corruption activism boiled down to nagging and complaining, without solid data. We wanted to measure corruption with reliable tools, so as to understand the extent of the problem and help people to fight it.” Sakker El Dekkene gives users the opportunity to access extensive data about corruption in Lebanon, contribute to the database by reporting incidents in detail and receive guidance about how to lodge a complaint to the authorities. It also offers an open data source about administrative procedures, such as which governmental body to approach with a specific request, what documents are required for such a procedure, and how much each procedure will cost. This allows users to save time and effort when dealing with the Lebanese administration, which is notoriously slow and difficult to navigate.

Sakker El Dekkene’s app has been downloaded by nearly 6,000 people. It now collaborates with state institutions to fight corruption on a larger scale, recently signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Economy allowing the NGO to publish all evidence of corruption within that ministry. This is a major breakthrough for the NGO, as by getting the ministry on board, it is also protecting itself from any potential crackdown on its activism. The group also produces awareness videos and has a strong presence in schools and universities, running workshops, presentations and stalls to raise awareness and empower young people to take action against corruption.

“There is an absence of accountability in Lebanon, and at first people thought that this couldn’t be fought,” says Chaer. “But we gave them a platform to shout out, with scientific tools evidencing why we can’t keep going on like this: how much corruption is costing us, and how it is affecting our rights and our safety, how it is killing us, really.”

Other initiatives around the Arab region have not withstood the test of time, failing to remain sustainable over the years. In Morocco, the project Mamdawrinch (meaning “we will not bribe” in Moroccan Arabic) mapped incidents of bribery using the open-source crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi, before closing down in 2014 due to a lack of resources and political pressure. Sudan Vote Monitor also used Ushahidi to allow citizens to report anomalies (intimidation and harassment, vote tampering and violent incidents) during the 2010 elections, but the project also failed to survive afterwards. Kuwait Transparency Society (founded in 2005) ran an online database with resources on how to fight corruption and promote transparency, before being closed down by the Kuwaiti authorities in 2015.

Technology has huge potential as an effective tool against corruption in Arab countries, where internet usage is widespread, technology relatively available and social media is a rapid and efficient platform for exposing crime and sending out calls to action. However the challenge for Arab activists in this field has been to establish a long-term plan for their project. This requires commitment, protection against intimidation and threats, and a sustainable organisational structure. Chaer explains: “Anti-corruption activism needs a start-up mentality, a professional marketing plan, and effective technology. This is a new model.”

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.