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Bribery and the Banknote Scandal
 

We’ve been campaigning about the impact of bribery and corruption on the world’s poor at the Global Poverty Project, and on the weekend, another allegation of western complicity in corruption emerged.

Two Australian companies owned by the Reserve Bank (Australia’s central bank) and six employees have been charged with bribery in Australia’s first international bribery case. The Age picks up the story:

AUSTRALIA'S foreign bribery laws are to be strengthened in the wake of the Reserve Bank of Australia corruption scandal.

The Australian Federal Police has told The Sunday Age that it has been working on suggested legislative changes with the Attorney-General's Department as a result of a 26-month investigation that on Friday led to Australia's first-ever foreign bribery charges being laid against RBA banknote firms Securency and Note Printing Australia (NPA) and six former executives.

It’s excellent news that the Australian Federal Police are pursuing prosecution – far too often these cases are settled out of court, and it’s even better that there are moves afoot to strengthen foreign bribery laws.

The guilt or otherwise of the firms and people involved remains to be seen, but in the meantime, and with the implementation last week of the UK’s new Bribery Act, it’s a timely reminder of why it’s so important we fight bribery – not just to fight poverty, but because it’s bad for business.

I’m regularly told by business owners and people working in poor countries that they have no choice but to engage in bribery and corruption at times, and so today, I thought I’d take a step back and outline five reasons why that’s not a good enough excuse, and just shouldn't be accepted by boards, shareholders, staff and the community at large.

1. It’s illegal.
Seems straight forward enough, but much like speed limits and texting while driving, it seems that in this case, the law is far too often interpreted as a polite suggestion. It’s not. The fines and jail sentences for bribery are often bigger than those for some violent crimes. From a business point of view, a bribery conviction will usually debar your firm from bidding for any government contracts, and many large business contracts.

2. Your face and brand in the newspaper for all the wrong reasons.
Bribery cases get a huge amount of publicity, as the media and public are fascinated by the sordid details of backroom deals almost as much as they are by celebrity sex lives. Few in Australia had ever heard of Securency or the Australian Wheat Board before the press coverage caused their names to become synonymous with corruption.

3. “Other people are doing it” is not an ethical escape clause.
For as long as I can remember, my mother explained to me that the bad behaviour of other people doesn’t excuse, validate or permit me to do the same. I can’t murder people just because others do, I can’t steal just because others do, and I can’t bribe just because others do.

4. Bribery promotes a race to the bottom
Paying bribes promotes paying more of them in the future. If everyone pays a bribe to win a contract, then the person or organisation running the contract process will take all the money, reward the highest bidder, and expect even more next time. It’s a business cost that will just keep growing, with no relevance to the value of your businesses services.

5. Bribery weakens institutions and rewards the wrong people.
Business needs an effective rule of law to function. You need clear property rights, enforcement mechanisms, infrastructure that works, and a workforce with the skills and capacity to grow your business. Bribery undermines all of those things by rewarding people who cut corners and do deals instead of people achieving results. It gives more power to the bribe recipient, and means that you’re undermining the institutions that you rely on for your business to thrive.

In an age where corporate reputation is increasingly important, I’m astonished at the degree to which bribery is still tolerated by companies working in poor countries.

I care about fighting bribery and corruption because it hurts the world’s poorest the most. Bribery is a risk that businesses can manage and mitigate around, for the world’s poor, it’s all too often a life or death decision.

Regardless of your motivation, this new case, and the many more I’m sure are still to come are a reminder of this, and a reminder of why our ongoing education and campaigning is so important to help fight bribery in the broader fight against extreme poverty.
 
Posted by Simon Moss - GPP General Manager (Policy and Content Development) in Corruption & Governance for column Issue Analysis on Jul 5th 2011, 06:45
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Knowing Where our Aid Goes
 

The Global Poverty Project is proud to get behind the international Publish What you Fund coalition, and their call to make aid transparent.

We’re passionate at the Global Poverty Project about the power of well-directed foreign aid to transform and save lives, making massive difference in the fight against poverty.

But, for us to know whether it’s well directed, we need to know where the aid is going.

And all too often at the moment, we have no idea. And that's not good enough.

That's why we're calling on governments to publish what they fund, as part of fulfilling their promises to make their aid more transparent. In November at a big meeting in Korea they will measure their progress so far - and we want to send them a strong message about what we expect.

Together with forty other organisations from all over the world, we are launching an unprecedented campaign calling on governments to publish more and better information about the aid they give. This petition will be presented to political leaders at key moments throughout the year, with the first handover planned at an OECD meeting in Paris in July.

Show your support and help revolutionise the future of aid by signing the petition.

Aid transparency matters, not just because it impacts the lives of the poor directly. It has a massive influence on the way the public see poverty. As we wrote in our submission earlier this year to the independent review of the Australian aid:

Complete Transparency of Activities & Outcomes. In the absence of information to the contrary, the Australian public make assumptions about the effectiveness or otherwise of Australian aid. AusAID should take a radical approach to transparency, and publish in full the tenders, contracts, progress, impact and evaluation reports funded by Australian aid.

At a time when their budgets are under pressure and the effectiveness of international aid is being scrutinised, governments are reviewing their commitments and so a public push for greater transparency now will make a huge difference.

With more information, citizens in both donor and recipient countries could know whether aid money was having the best possible impact and can reduce waste, corruption and gaps in funding. This is a critical year in making this a reality.

Sign the petition to make aid transparent now.
Posted by Simon Moss - GPP General Manager (Policy and Content Development) in Aid for column Issue Analysis on Jun 16th 2011, 06:49
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GAVI receives $4.3b in pledges
 

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation has just finished its pledging conference.

GAVI received a total of $4.3b in pledges, well in excess of the $3.7b that they were aiming for.

The biggest contributions came from the UK government at $1.3b, and the Gates Foundation at $1b. Norway and the USA made large contributions, as did Australia (as we reported last night).

Below the headlines though, there's some exciting developments. Brazil and Korea made pledges. An increasing number of private foundations pledged too. You can see a full breakdown of GAVI's pledges here.

This isn't just a case of rich helping poor - it's a case of global solidarity where there's strong recognition that the health of children everywhere matters to all of us.

This overwhelming support for GAVI demonstrates that even in tough economic times, there's space to do the right thing.

As one of the many organisations who have campaigned to support GAVI's life-saving work, thank you.

But remember, there is still much to be done.

We must remain vigilant and ensure that the pledges become cheques, and the cheques become results.

We must hold our governments to account for these promises, and hold GAVI to account to ensure that they're getting the greatest possible value for money. Oxfam and MSF have asked some tough questions about the effectiveness and efficiency of GAVI, and we need to welcome these as an essential step to ensuring accounability.

We must remember that GAVI supports only a few vaccines - there's still a funding gap in the fight to end polio - and that vaccines are just a small part of the bigger movement for global health, which in turn is part of the bigger movement to end extreme poverty. 

 
Posted by Simon Moss - GPP General Manager (Policy and Content Development) in Global Health for column Success Stories on Jun 13th 2011, 23:16
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Australia pledges $200m to GAVI
 

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation pledging conference got off a great start this evening as Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, the back of whose head you can see here, pledged $200m over the next 3 years to save the lives of the world's poorest and most vulnerable children.

The Foreign Minister received a well-deserved spontaneous round of applause after his announcement, a congratulatory pat on the back from Bill Gates (in the right of the image), and a rather impressed smile from UK Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell (on the left).

$200m over 3 years represents a more than threefold increase in funding to GAVI from the Australian Government, enabled by the increase in foreign aid to 0.5% of GNI that has been secured in recent years. [Update: we previously said tenfold increase, but were rightly corrected by Garth Luke at World Vision Australia. It's gone from $20m a year to $67m a year]

This result is a testament to hard work of Australian citizens demanding more of their government, and especially the work of our friends at RESULTS Australia, whose tireless campaigning on GAVI has surely had an impact here.

GAVI has saved 5.4 million lives over the past 10 years, and has the potential to save another 4 million in the next 5 years - if it receives enough funding at Monday's pledging conference.

In just over 12 hours, the full donor conference happens, and by about 2:00pm UK time, we expect to know how much of the $3.7b (£2.3b) needed by GAVI is forthcoming to fund vaccines for roughly 243 million children.

But, as GAVI staff were keen to point out to me today, a pledge is a long way from a cheque, and a cheque is a long way from success.

That's why it's vital that we keep pushing our Governments to deliver on their promises, and ensure transparency and accountability in the way that our aid money is spent so that we're sure it goes to saving lives through organisations like GAVI.

GAVI is a testament to the power of well-targeted, effective aid, and a reminder in these tough economic times that our money really can make a difference.

We welcome the announcement by Foreign Minister Rudd, and look forward to the announcements by other Governments, Foundations and groups in the next 24 hours, which together, could help millions of mothers and fathers around the world forgo the pain of losing a child to an easily preventible disease like diahrroea.
Posted by Simon Moss - GPP General Manager (Policy and Content Development) in Global Health for column Issue Analysis on Jun 13th 2011, 07:25
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Saving 4 million lives
 

On June 13, world leaders will gather in London for a donor conference for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization.

GAVI has saved 5.4 million lives in the last 10 years, and could save another 4 million in the next 5 years - if it has enough money.

Right now, GAVI is £2.3 billion short of what it needs, which is why Monday's meeting is so important, and why the Global Poverty Project, alongside our friends at ONE, Save the Children and RESULTS have been campaigning to ensure that our governments make strong and ambitious pledges.

To put this £2.3 billion in perspective, it works out to a funding gap of around £450m a year. That's just one fifth of the £2.12b it's estimated is spent each year around the world on hair loss treatments. And, in a country where one of the biggest news stories of the week is Wayne Rooney's hair transplant, it's one that we think is particularly timely.

Diarrhoea - an illness that all of us have had - kills 2 million children every year. A third of these deaths are caused by Rotavirus, a curable, preventable virus for which there's now a vaccine. Drug company Glaxo-Smith Kline have just reduced the cost of this vaccine for GAVI by 95%, which means that a fully-funded GAVI could save 500,000 lives a year from this one intervention alone.

But beyond the numbers, GAVI is about real people's lives, as the below clip about Rotavirus shows so well...
Posted by Simon Moss - GPP General Manager (Policy and Content Development) in Global Health for column Success Stories on Jun 9th 2011, 07:05
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