U.S. Joins Hands with Private Sector to Combat Corruption
U.S. Joins Hands with Private Sector to Combat Corruption
By RMN News Service
The U.S. Department of State has announced that 25 companies have joined the Global Initiative to Galvanize the Private Sector as Partners in Combating Corruption (GPS).
In its statement released on March 29, the State Department said Amazon, Anglo American plc, APCO, Cementos Pacasmayo, Crescent Enterprise, Crowell & Moring, Ericsson, Google, Grundfos, Iberdrola, Johnson & Johnson, McDermott, McKinsey, Merck, Novartis, Paul Hastings, Refinitiv, RELX, Rolls-Royce, SABIC, SNC-Lavalin, Tesla, Ulula, Walmart, and Yara have committed to joining the (GPS).
GPS, a key program under the Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal, is a vehicle for engaging the private sector as advocates for transparency and accountability and identifying and disseminating innovative private sector practices and approaches to combating corruption.
The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement at the Department of State (INL) has committed a minimum of $6.5M in funding to the initiative.
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Amazon, Novartis, and SNC-Lavalin will participate in Compliance Without Borders, an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Basel Institute on Governance initiative, which matches compliance experts with State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) seeking to build capacity to address corruption- and integrity-related challenges.
Amazon will leverage its proprietary compliance toolkits to support small- and medium-sized businesses and, alongside SNC-Lavalin, support the development and implementation of an INL-funded and OECD-developed Infrastructure Anti-Corruption Toolbox (IACT). IACT will empower actors across the infrastructure value chain to prevent, detect and report corruption.
Novartis and SNC-Lavalin will provide independent support to small- and medium-size enterprises. Using new tools it is developing to facilitate stakeholder agency.
Walmart will provide regular anti-corruption input from its stakeholder base. It will contribute to GPS capacity building efforts through ongoing work on Digital Tools for Rule of Law & Recovery and channel ongoing workstreams to boost the SDG33 model as a leadership opportunity for corporate public policy functions.
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As part of a commitment to working with local journalists worldwide to improve their understanding of digital safety and cybersecurity, Microsoft partnered with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in 2022 to expand a training curriculum for investigative journalists on the abuse of state resources in elections.
The training was piloted in October 2022 in Tunisia and November 2022 in Serbia among 29 local journalists, and focused on digital safety to help journalists map personal risks, cybersecurity to defend themselves online, and strengthening journalists’ capacity for safely investigating state abuse of public resources.
According to the State Department, this training is in high demand across IFES’ global project portfolio of 33 countries, and IFES is looking to conduct additional training in 2023 and 2024.
Tintra will provide financial and in-kind support to co-create along with USAID and other partners activities under the CTC Grand Challenge to creatively harness the power of data to more easily and effectively expose and prevent corruption.
As part of this effort (or separately if so requested), Tintra will host a hackathon / datathon in its offices with USAID’s key partners, advancing solutions toward a problem identified by USAID.
In addition, Tintra will offer a paid three-month mentorship to a promising early-stage finalist identified through the CTC Grand Challenge, which will include accommodations, training with Tintra’s coders, and support in developing, validating, and piloting their solution.
