Shanta Devarajan
‘Quiet corruption’undermines gains
Published: 31 March, 2010
Many African countries have continued to make progress on development indicators, but public service corruption is a drag on growth, the World Bank says
Poor service delivery due to small-scale corruption is exerting a considerable drag on African progress, according to the World Bank’s 2010 African Development Indicators report. “Resource leakage”, such as teacher and doctor absenteeism, systematic small-scale theft of resources and public sector failures in quality control have a major social and economic impact. However, they are often overlooked by governments and donors, who prefer to focus on investigating much larger-scale offences.
“This is corruption that doesn’t make the headlines of the large amounts of money flowing between the private sector and government, but it’s when a teacher fails to show up to the classroom, or the doctor is missing or the medicines are missing in the clinic, or when the fertiliser is doctored so it’s useless,” says Shanta Devarajan, the chief economist of the World Bank’s Africa region. “This is corruption that affects poor people directly, whereas the big money changing hands affects them indirectly.” Teacher absenteeism in public primary schools in Uganda in 2007 was 20 percent, the report says. Resource leakage of cash or in kind resources in healthcare in Chad in 2004 was 99 percent.
The long term effects of the issue are significant, Mr Devarajan says. Education and healthcare are obviously impacted by absenteeism; poor fertiliser standards have persistent effects on farmers’ behaviour and productivity. “These are all stories that we’ve known for a long time, but now we have some systematic evidence,” he adds. The study found that one fewer day per month of teacher absenteeism is associated with a 4 to 5 percent improvement in student test scores.
Measures, such as a healthcare report card programme instigated in Uganda, have demonstrated that there are options for governments looking into the issue. “There are some indications that things are getting better because there is more transparency in many countries, for example Rwanda and Uganda, and there is more participation in civil society, more attention given to service delivery,” says Jorge Saba Arbache, the report’s author. The World Bank hopes that the ADI report will put in place a framework and a terminology to allow civil society and governments to be better able to understand and tackle “quiet corruption”.
Mr Devarajan says that ultimately, changing the incentives for public service employees may be the only way to genuinely alter institutions that have endemic quiet corruption. The myth that increasing pay is the principal weapon against absenteeism needs to be challenged, he says.
The ADI shows that, on average, there has been little appreciable change in transparency across the continent, although that average masks wide variations between countries.
The World Bank predicts economic growth will rebound to between 4 and 4.5 percent across Africa, on the back of solid macroeconomic management in key countries during the crisis. Likewise, poverty reduction has remained on track in proportional terms, although population growth means the absolute number of poor continues to rise. Other development indicators have also shown improvements. “Child mortality has started to fall quite precipitously since 2000,” Mr Devarajan says. “In primary education, if you take all the countries in the world and start counting in 1999, the fastest growth in primary completion rates has been in Africa.”
At the base of this, Mr Devarajan explains, is continued government reform. “There’s a long way to go, but governments are undertaking reforms that actually benefit the bottom end of the population that actually promote pro-poor growth,” he says.
