File:Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE), SOAS University of London.webm

English: An introduction to Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) project.

A team led by Professor Mushtaq Khan, Professor of Economics at SOAS University of London, has been awarded a £6 million contract by the Department for International Development (DFID) to lead research on tackling corruption in developing countries. DFID’s Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme (ACE) has been created to tackle corruption and lead to more effective, evidence-based anti-corruption initiatives by DFID and its partners.

Professor Khan said: “Corruption is a critical issue in many developing countries, and a major factor in many of the problems that DFID is committed to addressing. Our research offers an innovative approach, with a research framework that will generate operationally-relevant and context-specific research for DFID as well as other donors and developing countries. The ACE research is explicitly about anti-corruption and will help to identify what to do about corruption, not just describe it.”

“We have put together a high-calibre team of experts, bringing together organisations with strong track records in research and operational experience. Not only will we be delivering high-quality research but we will also engage with practitioners and policy makers to ensure its uptake.”

The SOAS-led consortium will include the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), which has internationally recognized expertise in governance in the health sector and Palladium, who are engaged in the delivery of development projects and operational research in developing countries. The consortium also includes three major developing country partners, the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) in Bangladesh, the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) in Nigeria and Research on Poverty Alleviation (REPOA) in Tanzania. Other partners include the University of Oxford, Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB), the James P. Grant School of Public Health in Bangladesh, Ifakara in Tanzania and the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER).

The consortium’s research will focus on Bangladesh, Nigeria and Tanzania. It will identify instances of corruption that have a high negative impact on economic development, and explore the different inter-dependent drivers responsible for them. This will provide policy makers with an assessment of the feasibility of targeting particular areas of corruption, taking into account the ways in which policy implementation is affected by the political context in which corruption is found.