Anti-Corruption

EAGLE And The Fight Against Corruption

The EAGLE Network’s projects follow up the entire law enforcement process from investigations to jail visits to confirm execution of sentences, in a body-guard system against corruption.

EAGLE took a decade-long baseline of zero prosecutions under the existing wildlife law - a shocking baseline shared with almost all Central and Western African countries with sharp contrast to the amount of public funds poured into conservation - as a symptom of failure of the aid business, and its inability to tackle the first obstacle to development - corruption.

EAGLE is an innovator of methods of fighting corruption within a law enforcement and law application process. Bribing attempts are documented in 85% of our field arrest operations, and 80% of all court cases within the legal system. But EAGLE is not an observer of corruption, it was created to fight corruption, redirecting the positive pressures existing within the system, usually wasted in large conference, to specific corruption attempts and the field realities that form corruption.

EAGLE Network’s projects are managed to effectively hit complicity and corruption.

Building Governance Vs. Capacity Building

The upsurge in donors funding does not result in an increased number of criminals jailed. Most of the funding is focused on “capacity building” without any diagnosis whether “lack of capacity” is indeed the problem. Our analysis shows that Governance is a far bigger problem than lack of capacity. Many times, increasing capacity of a corrupt system is not only ineffective but counter-productive.

There are ways to build good governance in the same way there are ways to build capacity. For more practical ways to shift from a “capacity building” approach to a “building governance” approach see our “Donors’ Governance Investment Manual”.

But the medicine-without-a-diagnosis problem is a symptom of yet another problem – lack of indicators. Programs are built without measurable standards for a tangible impact. In the wildlife law enforcement context this allows the “capacity building approach” to continue regardless of its lack of results, as the impact or lack of on number of major traffickers arrested, convicted and jailed is not measured. To go back to the hospital analogy, this would be like over–medicating an antibiotic to a cancer patient without monitoring whether his health gets better or worse, therefore never realizing the mistake.