Today is International Anti-Corruption Day. This day marks the 20th anniversary of the endorsement of the landmark global treaty – the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) – that recognized the importance of tackling corruption and set in place a framework to provide guidance to all countries on, firstly, how to stop it from occurring at all and secondly, how to investigate, prosecute and sanction corruption if it did still occur. Solomon Islands ratified UNCAC in early 2012, almost a decade after the Convention’s initial endorsement. That ratification signalled the Government’s own commitment to taking domestic action to tackle the complex problem of corruption, which has posed such a challenge to ensuring good governance and service delivery across the country.

Corruption can be found in every country. It is very clear that public funding lost to corruption diminishes the Government’s ability to deliver services. It can lead directly to lost revenue, but it can also manifest through the award of inflated countries to under-qualified bidders, to people being recruited or promoted to jobs that they are not qualified for and to bribes that lead officials to bend or break rules which then leads to government inefficiencies.

These good governance gaps have been shown to directly impact ordinary people’s ability to access critical services. Lost revenue can mean that schools and health clinics are not properly maintained. It can result in insufficient funds to purchase life-saving medicines, or education textbooks. It can limit the resources to invest in critical infrastructure such as proper water and sewerage systems, passable roads needed to enable travel for trade and renewable  energy sources that are needed to bring cheap energy to villages. In the Pacific, it can also results in under-funding of disaster preparedness initiatives and disaster responses.

Lived experiences combined with research has shown that stopping corruption and promoting public transparency and accountability is central to any Government being able to fulfil its obligations to reduce poverty, sustain peace and ensure sustainable development. This was explicitly recognized in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include three targets specifically calling for an end to corruption. Target 16.5 calls on countries to “substantially reduce corruption and bribery in all their forms”, target 16.6 calls for countries to “develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels” and target 16.10 calls on countries to “ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms.”

In Solomon Islands, weaknesses in public accountability has resulted in the ineffective and inequitable distribution of public services across Solomon Islands’ nine provinces, with tangible impacts on the delivery of health and education services.  A corruption perception survey undertaken in 2022 found that 1 in 5 Solomon Islanders had paid a bribe in the previous year, and 1 in 4 people reported they had experienced vote buying. Shockingly, a massive 90 percent of Solomon Islanders believed that “corruption is a big problem in business”. This likely reflects the long-term challenges that successive Solomon Islands Governments have faced in controlling corruption in the natural resources extraction sectors, which has had huge impacts on the ability to charge and collect proper royalties.

An April 2023 report from BBC Media Action looked at the current perception of Solomon Islands citizens with regard to local and national challenges. Their research indicated that the issue that was identified as the biggest national challenge was corruption at 35 percent of respondents. This tallies with a 2016 survey of public servants, residents and businesses which found around half of the people surveyed lacked confidence in the Solomon Islands Government due to concerns about favoritism/the wantok system (94 percent), acceptance of bribes/imposing of a commission (92 percent), lack of leadership/accountability (90 percent) and lack of leadership more generally (89 percent).

In response to the concerns raised by the public, private sector and officials themselves, it is very positive that successive Governments have taken action to set up a stronger framework for addressing corruption since UNCAC was ratified a decade ago. In 2017, the first National Anti-Corruption Strategy (NACS) was launched. That Strategy aimed to provide a roadmap for all stakeholders to concretely move forward to stop corruption and prosecute it where it occurred. Importantly, the Government recently finalized a revised NACS (with UN technical support) which update the four-year Action Plan that the Government will now seek to implement to address corruption. It will be critical that the Government invest sufficient resources in implementing the new Action Plan, to ensure the words on paper results in tangible changes in the lives of ordinary people across the country.