At the end of November, TINZ Board Director, Debbie Gee, and TINZ Transparency International Indo-Pacific Partnership (TI-IPP) Coordinator Coordinator, Rochelle Stewart-Allen, travelled to Bangkok to connect with other Indo-Pacific TI Chapters. The focus was launching Phase II of the Indo-Pacific STRONGG Project, a crucial initiative aimed at strengthening anti-corruption efforts across the region.
The regional meeting provided a valuable opportunity for the TI Chapters to share more about their achievements and challenges. Of particular interest was hearing about the change of government in Sri Lanka and how TI Sri Lanka has been able to contribute tools such as their governance reform tracker, beneficial ownership register, database for corruption investigations, and a procurement monitoring mechanism.
Other inspiring work being done by TI Indo-Pacific Chapters includes:
- Driving behavioural change by increasing civil society demand for anti-corruption
- Developing a MOOC online course on ethics and anti-corruption
- Election monitoring and observational reporting
- Development of anti-corruption strategies with local government agencies
- Lobbying around the creation of Beneficial Ownership Registers
- Training and support of youth-led anti-corruption paralegal communities to oversee public procurement processes
- Working at local state government level to enhance infrastructure and public service integrity through accountability, efficiency and ethics
- Training youth, women, students, and journalists on public budgeting advocacy and social auditing of public procurement
- Introducing an infrastructure corruption risk assessment tool
- Producing a national stocktake of climate governance issues
- Introducing tools to promote transparency and governance in state owned enterprises
- Training journalists and students on using big data to visualise, compare, and identify corruption across various sectors.
The opportunity to meet together in Bangkok enabled TI to showcase our anti-corruption achievements, learn from the initiatives of other partners and TI Chapters, and further strengthen our collective efforts to tackle corruption across the region.
