46. Lola Adekanye on the anti-corruption efforts by the Center for International Private Enterprises

Lola Adekanye (@lola_kanye) is a Senior Program Officer, Africa at the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE). Her background in compliance and banking got Lola interested in development and ethics, a stopover at the World Bank. Lola describes CIPE’s work at the intersection of the private and public sector, using market-oriented reforms to tackle corruption, with the key goal: drive up the cost of corruption and drive up the cost of compliance. Lola describes joint work with the University of Sussex trying to get a better understanding why people do not engage in corruption. She also describes concrete ideas against corruption, such as the Compliance Clubs in Kenya that provide a support network for enterprises to do business without engaging corruption. The interview touches on how corruption in Subsaharan African is often a survival issue, listen to the short term reasons to develop long term solutions. They follow the principle of 3R consisting of: How to RESPOND to request of corruption by providing them with realistic alternatives RECORD the request and pass it on to the higher level REPORT the request in order to get an estimate of how often such payment request occur Lola describes the Ethics first project as an example for realistic ethics guidelines and cautions against short-term impact measures as change often takes time and requires institutionalization of ethics. Her advice for young scholars is crucial: stay in the game and don’t burn out by taking small steps towards improvement. Strengthening Ethical Conduct and Business Integrity: A Guide for Companies in Emerging Markets: https://www.cipe.org/resources/strengthening-ethical-conduct-business-integrity-a-guide-for-companies-in-emerging-markets/ Free Anti-Corruption online course: https://cipe.course.tc/login?error=no_cookie&id=&course_title=Anti-Corruption%20Compliance%20Training&wp=/ac-compliance/