The education and awareness campaign for the implementation of UNCAC - the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. Last week, experts from the UN were offering guidance to municipal leaders.
This week, the instruction is for independent oversight bodies - Civil Society Organizations, called CSO's. Carolyn Trench Sandiford is facilitating and we spoke to her.
Carolyn Trench-Sandiford, Facilitator
"The primary objective is to enhance the capacities of CSO's to be strong actors and advocates in the implementation of UNCAC. If we look at the landscape and we look at the amount of monies that are lost due to corruption each year it is estimated about 10%. So if our GDP is 3.9 billion dollars the 10% is about 380 million dollars. So that's the first thing. Secondly, the media as you quite rightly said earlier and civil society organisations are also considered like the 4th actor in the whole process of governance amd democracy and so the more involved civil society and the media is in terms of holding government accountable then the more countable the government is going to be and the less the corruption is going to be. Thirdly, what we are trying to do today is to improve their capacities and by improving their capacities we are trying to do 3 things. The first is how we create the linkage between anti-corruption and achieving our national development goals the more people know and the more knowledge and the more the media participate in exposing and unearthing some of the corruption that is taking place and how power is mismanaged for personal gain and greed, then I think the more then people are going to hold government accountable."
This training continues all week. 20 CSO's are participating.
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