Citizens and business people may invest significant time and money in building informal networks with public officials to overcome public service delivery shortcomings and access business opportunities. Understanding these networks better can strengthen anti-corruption efforts.

This research case study gives a brief overview of our Public Governance team's research in Uganda and Tanzania. Through interviews, the team explored when, how and why informal networks are built and used to access public services or business opportunities corruptly.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal Governance, this paper interprets informal networks as investments made by citizens and business people to cope with the public sphere. Informal networks often orchestrate corruption, connecting public and private actors. The paper aims to understand their key characteristics, scopes, and functional roles.

This case study explains how the Ugandan Inspectorate of Governance achieved a landmark prosecution of a former Principal Accountant in the Office of the Price Minister under the country’s illicit enrichment law.

On 28 October 2020, Uganda registered a landmark judgment under its illicit enrichment law in the case of Uganda v Geoffrey Kazinda. Although there have been a couple of other previously prosecuted illicit enrichment cases, the Kazinda case is the most significant because of the vast sum of money involved: a total of UGX 4,630,195,258 (over USD 1,252,600).

This case study explains how Ugandan prosecutors obtained the first ever convictions under the 2013 Anti-Money Laundering Act, overcoming numerous challenges in relation to the financial investigation, prosecution, international cooperation and asset management.

What role could tax investigations play in detecting, investigating and prosecuting cases of illegal wildlife trade? Potentially a large one, with the right coordination and capacity.

Corruption is frequently associated with money alone and the behaviours of a few individual “bad apples” operating in otherwise healthy governance systems. This is too simplistic. As the latest research shows, including research in Tanzania and Uganda on which this Policy Brief is based, corruption is a networked phenomenon. This Policy Brief explains what this means and its implications for anti-corruption practice.

This Policy Brief distils recommendations for Collective Action practitioners based on empirical insights on certain forms of corruption involving private-sector actors.

The four case studies in this collection form part of a research project entitled Harnessing informality: Designing anti-corruption network interventions and strategic use of legal instruments” funded by UK Aid as part of the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme (GI-ACE).