Citizens Against Corruption (CAC) is a grant management programme implemented by PAC. It is supported by Partnership for Transparency Fund (PTF), Washington D.C. CAC aims to fund initiatives by NGO and CSOs in South Asia that stimulate, capacitate and facilitate citizens to fight against corruption. PTF, in turn, sources its support from DFID’s Governance and Transparency Fund (GTF). As designed by PAC and PTF, three pillars of logic support and inform the programme:

1. Community engagement and empowerment – CAC has throughout stressed the importance of project sustainability and the need for civic engagement and community ownership of project processes. Through this we hope to build lasting civic action movements against corruption which constantly pressure and work with the government to this end in order to create a non-corrupt and responsive system of service delivery. Through this approach, partners have been encouraged to use existing community-based organisational structures (such as SHGs) wherever possible, or to establish new coalitions of local organisations.

2. Constructive engagement – Engaging meaningfully with the government has been a key feature of CAC programming. This involves developing links with interested and like-minded officials within government structures at all levels of public governance (panchayat, block, district, state, etc) and encouraging dialogue. This is intended to minimise conflict and to generate an internal institutional response from those public agencies seen to be active in corrupt practices.

3. Peer learning – CAC aims to promote a learning environment among anti corruption stakeholders across the region. This implies that the activity base of CAC will be periodically reviewed by peers within the groups as well as by external resource persons through interactive fora such as discussion groups, workshops and a website.

These approaches have been pervasive in the design and delivery of CAC, guiding all operational aspects of programme management to date such as: concept selection; proposal development; and project monitoring. Transparency has been an underpinning principle in the delivery of these approaches: the utmost effort has been taken to develop and execute all technical processes in a transparent and objective manner – a value we believe is necessary in order to conduct anti-corruption work in a morally consistent manner. This has been carried out by developing comprehensive systems and formats which subject all concept papers and proposals to rigorous impartial review such that little room remains for unfair and non-meritorious project funding. Steps have also been taken to ensure transparency and credibility of programme partners through accreditation with Credibility Alliance (CA) – a national-level organisation aimed at improving transparency within the NGO sector through the development of standard minimum good governance norms and practices for NGOs. CAC partners, in their accreditation process, are required to periodically inform the public of their financial status and operational progress of their plans.

Upon receipt of 160 concept notes from the initial call for proposals, CAC has adopted a regional and needs-based approach to project selection, hence CAC has thus far approved 16 projects spread across India (13) and Nepal (2) and an individual project in Sri Lanka. Profiles of partner projects are given in the side links.

In Year 2 of the programme, on top of monitoring of existing projects, we are primarily engaged in programme consolidation. In this regard we will be hosting peer review and monitoring events for CAC partners to encourage lesson learning as well as wider outreach to media, CSOs and high-level policymakers in order to deepen programme impact. In particular we will hold high-level workshops on reducing corruption in PDS and NREGA since most projects focus on these schemes. A programme newsletter and operations manual is currently under preparation and will be disseminated in the interest of keeping interested stakeholders of programme progress and the procedures by which CAC functions.

Though we are unable to support any more projects financially within the current resource frame, we warmly welcome organisations and actors who are willing to be involved in taking the cause further.If you have any queries or comments on CAC please contact Mr M.S Raviprakash for further information.

The Citizens Against Corruption programme in PAC is run by the following team: 

Mr. M.S Raviprakash, Programme Manager

J. Mary Pushpa Kanthi, Executive Assistant