EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In far too many countries, parents are put in the impossible position of having to pay a bribe, which they cannot afford, or their child will miss out on the lifesaving treatment that it desperately needs. This was the situation that Kamal from Morocco was faced with when his partially blind daughter urgently needed a brain scan. He had to make the choice between paying the exorbitant bribe that the nurse was demanding or his daughter would not be seen. This isn't a unique story, and in this latest Middle East and North Africa edition of the Global Corruption Barometer we find that 50 million adults in the region are having to pay bribes to access the basic services that they need. This is one of the findings from our survey, which aims to give a voice to ordinary citizens' views and experiences of corruption and help hold governments to account for their actions – or lack thereof – at stopping public sector graft. For the survey we are in partnership with the Afrobarometer and several national partners of the Arab Barometer network, which spoke to 10,797 adult respondents from September 2014 to November 2015 in nine countries and territories: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan, Tunisia and Yemen.1 Public dissatisfaction with corrupt leaders and regimes has been a key catalyst for change in the Middle East and North Africa, notably with the Arab Spring protests, which began in 2010 and swept across the region in the years following. Yet, despite half a decade having passed since many of these protests first took place, our Global Corruption Barometer still finds widespread public dissatisfaction with government efforts to curb public sector graft. Perhaps even more worrying, the majority of people in the region perceive corruption to have risen recently (61 per cent), and many think that government officials and Members of Parliament are highly corrupt. Bribery is a common occurrence in public service delivery in the region,2 where almost a third of people (30 per cent) who tried to access key public services in the 12 months prior to the survey say that they paid a bribe – or around 50 million adults.3 The extent of the bribery reported in our survey is a major cause for concern, as widespread corruption is linked to governmental institutions that are inefficient and distrusted. Corruption also leads to an unfair distribution of services and undermines law and order. Positively, a majority of people in the region feel empowered to help in the fight against corruption. Reporting incidences of bribery is seen by citizens as one of the key ways for stopping corruption (24 per cent). That said, the region faces a number of challenges in getting more people to report. Many fear retaliation (30 per cent) or think that nothing will be done (19 per cent).i Unfortunately these fears are substantiated by our findings: nearly two in five (38 per cent) of those who reported a bribery incident suffered retaliation, while fewer than a third (29 per cent) say that the authorities took action as a result. These experiences indicate that whistleblowers and witnesses of corrupt acts need to be better protected and also that reporting channels need to be made more effective.ii With bribery in front-line public services still rife across the region and the overall perception that corruption is on the increase, the anti-corruption community in the Middle East and North Africa has 1
Please see the Methodology section on page 28 for a full explanation of the methodology. For the sake of readability, we use the term “region” even though the report includes only nine countries/territories in the Middle East and North Africa. 3 This estimate is made on the basis of the approximate total number of adults aged 18+ living in each of the surveyed countries according to available population data, which gives a figure of 50,405,980. See Methodology for full details. 2
4
TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL