The U.N. Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) is calling for a departure from perception-based measures of corruption and cross-country comparisons which it says are flawed and fail to provide enough guidance for policy.

Perception-based approaches are prominent due to the secrecy that often surrounds corruption in Africa and the difficulty gathering data on factual experiences of corruption, according to a report by Emmanuel Odonkor in GhanaBusinessNews.

These approaches often measure corruption by assessing the perceptions of a broad range of experts and other individuals on corruption levels, combined with country rankings.

There are several reasons why perception-based approaches to assessing corruption are not very useful for policy making, according to U.N. Economic Commission for Africa’s African Governance Report, entitled “Measuring Corruption In Africa: The International Dimension Matters.”

These include:

• Ambiguous definitions of corruption.
• Prominent use of experts’ assessments and their re-evaluation of available data.
• The tendency to focus on the response of criminal justice systems to corruption instead of the true extent and nature of the crime itself.

“Current indicators do not present a reliable picture of corruption in Africa, since they are perception-based,” the report said. “For any indicator of corruption to be strong and reliable, it is necessary that the sample be homogeneous. The standard practice is that the different indicators, used in the various corruption indices, are gathered from surveys administered to a limited sample of people.”

Results of perception-oriented assessments such as the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment, and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index and the Global Corruption Barometer can sometimes change more than corruption itself, Odonkor said.

The U.N. Economic Commission for Africa Report, which will be launched April 2 in Addis Ababa during Africa Development Week, advises that perception-based methods which are “anchored on more transparent and representative surveys” should be used cautiously, complemented where possible with quantitative country or case-specific indicators to produce more useful measures of corruption.

The U.N. Economic Commission for Africa urges greater attention on the transnational dimension of corruption in Africa, since it is likely Africa loses much more to corruption by multinational companies than the multitude of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Corruption data rarely captures the international dimension of corruption, even though the phenomenon is an international one.

“Many corrupt practices on the continent are generated and abetted by non-African players,” said Carlos Lopes, executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa.

Lopes is a Bissau-Guinean development economist, author and educator.

“Given the prominence and pertinence of its international dimension, the problem of corruption in Africa cannot be tackled by crafting policies which are exclusively domestic oriented,” the African Governance Report said. “At a minimum, there is a need to sharply increase the transparency of the international financial system and to augment the capacity of states to place an obstacle to illicit financial flows which are instrumental to the more vicious and damaging occurrences of corruption.”

Corruption is increasing in Africa for three main reasons, according to the African Governance Report:

•  Institutional weakness in many African countries which allows political leaders and public servants to misuse national resources with impunity.
• Poor incentives and a decline in the living standards of public servants.
• Turning a blind eye to corruptors by Western countries.

Foreign companies and private interests often take advantage of weak and ineffective institutional mechanisms to secure political privileges and deal with corrupt state officials in order to gain undue advantage, according to the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa.

Here are some of the ECA’s recommendations:

• African states should introduce and enforce processes that allow for greater citizen participation in policy making and development planning.
• Improve transparency by enacting and implementing right-to-information laws.
• Build credible governance institutions.
• Foster international collaboration to improve the global governance. architecture by giving equal attention to the supply side of corruption.
• Be proactive in activities to combat illicit financial flows.