How UDEME is fighting corruption in Nigeria's public sector

In an effort to fight government corruption, an initiative called Tracka monitors public spending allocations and holds town hall meetings in communities across Nigeria to educate residents about the budgeting process. The organization has engaged 967 communities and helped hold officials accountable for projects that were funded but never completed, such as an electricity substation in Kawu.

The Udeme project trains student journalists to track government constituency projects and write investigative reports holding officials accountable when planned projects are stalled or poorly executed. The participants, called U-monitors, also meet with local community members to inform them about the budget process and help them track constituency projects themselves.

Ahmed Albasheer is an Iraqi journalist who uses a combination of humor and grassroots organizing to teach youth in Iraq and across the world about their government's corruption with his show, "The Albasheer Show.” He has been compared to Jon Stewart in how his weekly series airing on YouTube and satellite television engages young people through his comedic timing and straight-forward manner of speaking. As a result, protests have erupted, and the government has killed protesters in response, but Albasheer continues to boost morale and amplify their voices in solidarity.

Reduce corruption by making public data accessible and transparent. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, information about public works projects is available online, so excess spending is hard to hide. Meanwhile in Brazil, an observatory analyzes government expenditures and investigates suspicious transactions. Credit card expenditure fell by 25 percent after the data was published.

The CitizenApp allows Zimbabweans to anonymously report instances of government corruption, which are then made available to law enforcement officials and investigative journalists. The app has attracted 580 users since its launch in March 2023.

Media Rights Agenda helped a community in Lagos, Nigeria, submit Freedom of Information Act requests to draw attention to the community’s lack of basic amenities like roads and clean water. When government organizations ignored the requests, the organization took legal action and released a documentary about the issue to gain public support.

Mahoning Matters formed as a news site with laid-off veterans of the Youngstown Vindicator, filling part of a void in local accountability journalism in what is now the largest U.S. city without a seven-day print newspaper. Its funder, The Compass Experiment, set the startup on a three-year trajectory toward self-sustainability, an experiment that has yet to play out. Meantime, Compass successfully recruited a tiny band of Vindicator alumni, whose first stories have included unmasking the public official whose sexual misconduct compromised the management of a local police department.

Fact-based, data-driven, and solution-oriented journalism can shift the media paradigm from asking “what” to asking “how.” Solutions journalism, known also as constructive journalism in Europe, focuses on data and evidence to shift discourse from political advocacy and ideological debates to problem-solving and productive discussion. Using this approach, students in Eugene, Oregon, brought accountability to municipal administrators who had previously obfuscated the effectiveness of a program to reduce court caseloads.

When a new California law unlocked the disciplinary records on misconduct from 700 police agencies statewide, competing news organizations formed the California Reporting Project to accomplish as a team what would have been daunting, if not impossible, for each news organization individually: compile a database of all the records as they are released. Just months into the project, the resulting news stories informed the public of officers who escaped serious consequences for misconduct, and whose careers benefited from keeping the public unaware.

More than 30 California news organizations collaborated to gain access to, and publish news stories about, previously secret police disciplinary cases. Filing more than 1,100 records requests with more than 600 law enforcement agencies, members of the California Reporting Project leveraged each others' resources rather than competing to tackle the massive reporting project made possible by a new state transparency law. The collaboration is an example of local and regional partnerships that have helped a struggling news industry still cover local and state government news.