Submission to the UK Parliament International Development Committee “Effectiveness of UK Aid Inquiry”, 2020

Corruption in its various guises is well established as an impediment both to aid effectiveness and broader development goals: this is why anti-corruption efforts are a core aspect of official development cooperation; More transparent aid is on aggregate linked to lower levels of corruption in recipient countries; Aid transparency measures focused primarily on fiduciary risk management may miss the bigger picture of the many ways corruption can undermine fundamental aid and development objectives as laid out in the SDGs; DFID´s strong record on aid transparency is likely beneficial from an anti-corruption perspective: it provides data that enables others to identify and flag corruption problems in recipient countries, offering avenues for corrective measures and lessons for other UK departmental aid spenders; The UK should continue to promote clear-eyed, evidence-based analysis of discrepancies between states anti-corruption commitments in multilateral spaces and their actual performance; The global leadership demonstrated by the UK in attempting to stem the problems of illicit financial flows linked to foreign corruption should not be unwittingly compromised in any realignment of the UK´s foreign policy agenda.