The East African Bribery Index 2011 was launched today and showed that Burundi continues to be the country with the highest bribery prevalence (37.9%) in the region, followed by Uganda (33%) and Tanzania (31.6%). Rwanda is the least bribery prone country, with a bribery prevalence of 5.1%.
The index aims at measuring bribery levels in both the public and private sectors in the five countries in the region – Uganda, Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania. The 2011 edition results from a survey conducted with almost 13,000 randomly selected respondents in all countries between February and May 2011.
The results also points out which institutions are considered to be most prone to bribery in each country. A general finding in this aspect was that police institutions were among the 10 most bribery prone institutions in all countries, with the exception of Rwanda, where insufficient bribery reporting for each institution generated statistically insignificant figures.
Other findings showed that the law enforcement, education and health sectors in public service have high occurrence of bribes. In addition to the sectoral dimension, the survey also took into account gender cleavages in bribery, and showed that women experience more bribe demands than men in the health sector, whereas the latter pay more bribes than the former in the water and educations sectors.
The index also reflected low reporting of bribery cases to public authorities in all five countries. A post on Transparency International’s blog addresses this particular issue and mentions that among the causes behind such low reporting rates are fear of intimidation and ignorance about where to report bribery incidents.
Read the full East African Bribery Index 2011 press release on transparency.org, and the article What stops East Africans reporting corruption? on TI’s blog. The full report on the Index is also available online.
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