Accountability Lab is running HackCorruption, a hybrid tech-for-good project, with support from the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement at the U.S. Department of State, in partnership with the Center for International Private Enterprise. The project identifies and supports talented individuals from the civic tech, CSO, and activist arenas, to build innovative solutions to combat corruption. Our first HackCorruption event brought 100 participants from six Southern and East African countries to Johannesburg, South Africa, for a three-day event. 

The program has also been rolled out by Accountability Lab Nigeria, with support from NORAD, SIDA, UNDP Nigeria, and in partnership with Open Contracting Partnership and the Bureau of Public Procurement. We hosted three HackCorruption events in Edo, Ekiti, and Plateau states through the Anti-Corruption Innovation Project. 

During the  events, teams of innovators built and refined prototypes and pitched their ideas live to a panel of judges. Teams with credible, viable and well-developed solutions were chosen to receive further support from Accountability Lab and our partners to bring their ideas to fruition. 

The work has strong connections with one of our core programs, the Accountability Incubator, where, over the past decade, we’ve equipped young innovators with the tools to shift social norms through innovative solutions to accountability issues. Our experience with the Accountability Incubator prepared us to create an enabling environment for the creation of tech solutions through a different vehicle: a hackathon. 

We also found that ideas around partnerships, regional approaches, sourcing ideas from the ground up, and presenting challenges that resonate with our key audiences hold valuable lessons across these programs and the countries we run them in. 

While the events took place in different countries and contexts, our approach to the work remained the same. We’ve learned a few key lessons which we will use to amplify this work as we replicate it across the AL translocal network. 

The Power of Partnerships

We’ve found that a number of organizations are interested in the intersection of accountability, civic tech, youth development, and public procurement – and that challenges remain around impactful implementation. We have learned that dynamic partnerships with diverse, creative, and ambitious actors are critical to the success of these projects. We can’t rely solely on technologists and anti-corruption experts to build adaptable and applicable solutions without the support of global and local actors.  

We’ve leaned on the following elements to cultivate successful and powerful partnerships for civic tech programs:

1. Relying on CSO expertise to provide guidance: We leveraged expertise from both local and international CSOs to deepen the support we were able to offer participants. For example, we asked CIPE to lend their expertise to the creation of problem sets, which gave the participants specific and targeted challenges to solve through technology. We also leaned on local expertise from Change.org, OpenUp, and Open Cities Lab to offer examples of how civic tech solutions can create lasting change on the local, national, and regional level. 
2. Integrating government needs: We partnered with government departments during the problem mapping phase to address specific gaps where tech solutions could be useful in countering corruption. By building this partnership into the program design, we were able to gain valuable input during the design phase. We also engaged government officials to offer reverse pitches to the participants, which increases the likelihood of future partnerships and implementation.  
3. Weaving network-building into the structure of the program: By engaging with multiple actors across government, CSOs, and the private sector, we were able to foster a network of civic tech enthusiasts and innovators prior to the main event. Before the hackathon, we engaged experts in roundtable discussions and orientation sessions to discuss the problem sets in-depth and provide concrete examples of success in the civic tech space. This created a knowledge base for participants and prepared them to dive into the work as soon as they arrived. We also created opportunities throughout the three-day event and at the boot camp for participants to receive guidance and advice through curated mentorship sessions. 
4. Creating space for participants to connect: The most powerful partnerships we form during these events are with and between participants. We place an emphasis on fostering a supportive environment for innovation and opening up space for participants to connect across sectors, countries, and regions. 
5. Utilize internal networks: We also relied on internal expertise from former program participants – like Moepi Setona, who’s civic tech platform, Let’s Talk, has been implemented at the municipal level across South Africa. Additionally, we leveraged specialized expertise of our country and global teams in subject matters ranging from tech startup knowledge and branding to capacity-building workshops in both the ancillary programming and at the boot camp. 

Bringing New Groups of People Into Conversations about Accountability

Bringing new groups of people into conversations about accountability can provide valuable insights and ideas. These conversations and viewpoints can help to improve the quality and objectivity of the conversation, and lead to a more nuanced and well-rounded understanding of the issues being discussed. By actively seeking out and considering the perspectives of a diverse group of people, we can assure that the conversation is more representative of the community as a whole, which can help build trust and confidence in government and in decision-making processes. We like to call this the power of unlikely networks. 

For example, in preparation for the regional HackCorruption event in South Africa, we ensured diversity of the teams by partnering technology, blockchain, and AI experts with CSO professionals and good governance activists to strengthen the quality of the solutions. Adding another layer of diversity, we ensured gender diversity within each team by conducting targeted outreach to female coding groups. Not only were participants diversified by sector and gender, we also strived to cultivate international diversity within teams by ensuring that teams were composed of members from more than one country. 

The concept of unlikely networks  becomes particularly interesting when bringing tech entrepreneurs into good governance conversations. We’ve discovered that when startups and governments work together, everyone wins. Good relationships with government officials and entities can offer social startups a large customer base, important feedback and development assistance, and instant credibility. Conversely, social startups can provide governments with new solutions to internal challenges and innovation at a low price point. This contributes to the accountable use of government resources. 

In addition to supporting tech entrepreneurs, AL Nigeria engaged a number of journalists in their regional HackCorruption event, resulting in a deeper understanding of the complexities of corruption in the public procurement process by journalists and several published articles about the event. Journalists who participated in HackCorruption Nigeria now know which questions to ask and where to retrieve reliable data on public procurement for storytelling. One lesson drawn from HackCorruption Nigeria was that in order to draw in new audiences, we have to build the capacity of tech entrepreneurs and journalists. They must first understand the procurement process, which, by nature, can be complicated and convoluted. Across both programs, AL has aimed to make the public procurement process more relatable to its participants. 

Supporting Young Change-Makers to Source Ideas from the Ground Up

While supporting young social entrepreneurs, we’ve found that transforming civic tech ideas into social enterprises with the ability to disrupt the status-quo requires considerable capabilities and capacity-building. Through the selection process, we looked for participants with ambition, social acuity, credibility, and tenacity. We then worked to equip them with the necessary tools to create sustainable and impactful change. Before the hackathon, we provided participants with resource packs describing the problem sets and orientation sessions to help them think through solutions before they arrived. 

For the Southern and Eastern Africa regional hackathon, we encouraged the participants to think deeply about problem solving, human-centered design, and technical build-out. We then worked to build their skills around strategic thinking, team building, data collection, and stakeholder engagement through ancillary programming. Lastly, we deployed strategies around problem framing, using and expanding networks, leading by example, working with advocacy coalitions, and scaling up change processes at our HackCorruption Boot Camp.

The largest takeaway here is that sustainable change doesn’t happen from a singular three day event. Building the capacity and knowledge of young people takes a creative team with diverse areas of expertise and approaches, thoughtful planning, and a significant investment of time and energy. Participants need to be supported over several months, or even years, to fully realize their ideas. 

Regional Approaches are Important

Regional approaches can be a powerful component in addressing global challenges that can help ensure ideas and solutions are tailored to the specific needs and circumstances of different communities and regions. Additionally, regional approaches help to build a wider network across states or countries, which aids in finding common problems and common solutions. We’ve found the following reasons that regional approaches work well when sourcing new solutions to accountability challenges:

1. Context: Regional approaches can take into account the specific cultural, social, and economic context of a particular region, which can be effective in addressing local needs to larger global challenges. For example, while there were similarities across countries in the public procurement process, there were also nuanced differences, requiring a localized understanding and a tailored approach from each team. Similarly, in HackCorruption Nigeria, teams came up with solutions that were aimed at tackling specific gaps in accountability in each state. 
2. Ownership: Regional approaches can empower local communities to take ownership of the solutions to their challenges, which can lead to more sustainable and long-term results. Many teams initially built ideas that were designed to be implemented at the national level. However, over time and with input from mentors and stakeholders, the same ideas evolved to be piloted at the local or municipal level and scaled up. Specifically, one team has designed their platform to be introduced in Soweto township and another is piloting their project in Ekurhuleni municipality in South Africa.
3. Cooperation: Regional approaches can facilitate cooperation and collaboration across countries as well as at national and subnational levels , which can lead to a more coordinated and effective response, rather than a top-down approach. . For example, participants in the Johannesburg HackCorruption event discovered that many accountability issues were similar across countries, inspiring them to develop solutions and implementation plans that could be rolled out across multiple countries. 

Changemakers are Drawn to Corruption Issues that Resonate on a Personal Level

With technology as a part of their daily lives, young people are adept at using technology to learn about and address social issues that matter to them. In both the events, we found public procurement to be widely understood as problematic across many countries in Africa. With a bit of facilitation and capacity-building, participants were easily able to see how corruption and lack of accountability in the public procurement process has an impact on their everyday lives. 

In most cases, countries that participated in HackCorruption manage their public procurement processes through analog paper-based systems, which can present corruption challenges. In Nigeria, for example, the average bribe paid for a government contract or public procurement was N31,955 ($68) in 2019, up from N17,136 ($36) in 2016. While the Nigeria program was designed specifically around procurement, the regional event offered four problem sets to choose from. Out of four problem sets, many participants in the Southern and East Africa regional event chose to work on public procurement, discovering that the solutions they developed could be implemented in one context, then adapted and scaled to another. 

Changemakers are also familiar with online access to civic participation through platforms like TikTok, Instagram and SnapChat. After providing the participants a problem set around “Digital Citizenship to Constrain Corruption”, we found that some teams incorporated the use of participatory digital citizenship to address corruption issues through platforms that utilized AI to allow for anonymous tips, whistleblowing features, and citizen chat features. 

On the other hand, problem sets that didn’t have a direct impact on the participants, like beneficial ownership and accountable use of digital technology, were not as approachable. We used this learning to further build an understanding amongst the participants around how these topics intersect with procurement and other corruption issues through virtual workshops and mentorship in our ancillary programming series.  

Ultimately, we found it valuable to incorporate specific problem sets that affect young people on a personal level into the program structure and design. Then, build capacity around how to approach these problems and generate government buy-in. Incorporating problem sets that have stakeholder feedback directly from government officials can also be an important factor in building successful solutions. Lastly, creating pathways for young people to directly engage with government officials helps to build trusting relationships. We’ve seen the most success when young people can offer government entities ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness, ultimately making it easier for governments to deliver on their promises to citizens. While we recognize that creating a tool is only part of the solution, giving innovators space to ideate and build together has catalyzed new networks and renewed energy to engage in critical governance conversations.  

Written by Sara Hoenes

Sheena Adams