Director-General/Executive Director
Minister Nordio,
Excellencies,
Distinguished delegates,
Ladies and gentlemen,
It is my pleasure to welcome you to this event bringing together States Parties, international organizations, and civil society, to discuss how we can better harness data and evidence to fight corruption.
By measuring corruption and by sharing the results, we can foster transparency and accountability of public institutions, attract the attention of investors, and raise public awareness about the consequences of corruption.
However, measuring corruption is technically complex and often politicized.
Corruption is a hidden and illicit activity that takes different forms across countries and across sectors. There is no single number that can account for such complexities.
A comprehensive and context-specific approach to measuring corruption is needed, which States parties to the UN Convention against Corruption recognized in resolution 8/10 and the UNGASS political declaration.
Answering these calls, UNODC has developed a statistical framework to support States in building national systems to measure corruption.
The framework has benefitted from two rounds of expert consultations and the feedback from over 200 experts from 81 countries, as well as academia, international organizations, and civil society.
The UN Statistical Commission has welcomed it as a solid statistical tool.
The UNODC statistical framework is not aimed at producing a ranking, but to assist in a country’s self-assessment.
And this is important, we develop these tools countries to look at themselves and try to improve.
By providing a common set of definitions, indicators, methods, and sources for collecting and analysing data, the framework seeks to shed light on corruption offences criminalized under the Convention, including bribery of public officials; embezzlement, money-laundering and abuse of functions.
It looks at measures that can mitigate corruption, including how public officials are hired, and the integrity of the judiciary.
It assesses the mechanisms in place to manage public finances, procurement and access to information, and examines resource allocation.
Furthermore, it provides guidance on how to collect the needed data, and on how to analyse the indicators together, to enable deeper understanding of the very complex problem of corruption.
It is modular in approach, so that States can adapt it to their needs, to produce reliable and relevant evidence to inform policymaking and public debate.
The framework builds on progress we have made in measuring corruption related to bribery, which is an indicator for Sustainable Development Goal 16.
It also benefits from UNODC’s work providing capacity-building and technical guidance to countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America on conducting corruption surveys.
I am very glad to see that on the panel today we have champion countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and Mexico who are investing in these national surveys, which measure people’s real, everyday experiences of bribery, nepotism, vote buying, and other forms of corruption.
The Ghana survey was published in July 2022, and just last month the fieldwork for the third nationwide corruption survey in Nigeria was concluded in collaboration with the National Bureau of Statistics.
I am also pleased that the Ghana and the Nigeria surveys have paid special attention to measuring the gender-specific impacts of corruption.
Ladies and gentlemen,
The momentum for measuring corruption has never been stronger.
UNODC received applications from over 20 organizers from countries and civil society to host special events on measurement.
Since space and time are limited, we have merged the requests into this large, comprehensive event.
Allow me to thank our co-organizers from Ghana, Italy, Mexico, Montenegro, Nigeria, Serbia, OECD, UNDP Montenegro, the World Bank, the Center for Fiscal Transparency and Integrity Watch, the Center for International Private Enterprise and the International Sociological Association.
Thanks to your engagement and support, UNODC’s statistical framework to measure corruption can place the right tools in the hands of States, supporting their efforts to implement the UNCAC and helping them meet their sovereign responsibility to counter corruption.
We will continue engaging with all of you to support implementation of the framework.
I wish you a frank and fruitful dialogue.
Thank you.
I would now like to hand over to our moderator for this event, Ms. Angela Me.