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Humanitarian assistance aims to save lives and alleviate the suffering of people in times of crisis. Yet these noble ambitions do not immunise the business of aid delivery during crises from corrupt abuse. This report describes research on the problem of corruption in humanitarian assistance. The research seeks to document perceptions of corruption in humanitarian operations, including the context of humanitarian assistance, the risks and consequences of corruption, the policies and practices to mitigate or manage corruption risks, and remaining gaps in addressing corruption. The authors provide some examples of prevalent corrupt practices and the range of measures the cooperating agencies are using to counter the temptation of corruption, guard operations against corruption and allow for its detection.

This analysis suggests that, in recent years, humanitarian agencies have become more aware of the risks of corruption and have taken many steps to deal with these risks. However, there are remaining gaps that could be addressed both by better sharing of good practices within the humanitarian community, and by looking to good examples from outside of it. Also, many of the mechanisms agencies use to track and control normal financial and human resource procedures along with program quality mechanisms can be used to mitigate the risk of corruption and counter its effects.

This report makes a series of recommendations as to how the humanitarian community might move forward to increase discussion of corruption issues, develop improved systems to mitigate risk and better ensure its detection. These include:

• work to reduce or remove the 'taboo' in discussing corruption in humanitarian assistance and promote greater transparency in reporting corrupt abuse of aid, by providing leadership, changing staff incentives and setting up safe and effective complaint mechanisms
• incorporate corruption risk analysis into emergency preparedness and disaster risk reduction strategies and strengthen surge capacity
• allocate greater resources to program monitoring, especially field monitoring
• deepen the scope of audits beyond ‘the paper trail’ to include forensic objectives and
  practices
• encourage inter-agency coordination at national and international levels for information sharing and for joint action on corruption emanating from the external environment
  
  

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