Technology is neither good nor bad. It’s just a tool—a very powerful tool—and what matters is how the world uses it. It can be used as an avenue to help tackle corruption
[1].
The next couple of years will see artificial intelligence, automated processes and machine issued official documents enter states everywhere. Power to make decisions on issues is shifting from public sector workers to algorithms. E-governance applies digital tools in interactions between government, citizens and private business, and in internal government dealings. It is a digital venue to tackle corruption by making public sector processes paper and cashless and to accelerate SDG 16 implementation towards strong institutions marked by integrity.
But behind every opportunity are risks. In a world of digital divide, where large parts of the world population, especially women, do not have access to new technology, these new digital avenues to tackle corruption are only open to some. In addition, the code underpinning digital states risks being manipulated or corrupted. No code is more immune to corruption than the integrity and cleverness of the humans who wrote it.
It requires leaders to navigate to the frontiers of technology, of policy and of thinking to mitigate new types of corruption risks. The scale, spread, and speed of change made possible by digital technologies is unprecedented, but the current means and levels of international cooperation are unequal to the challenge.
Co-chairing the session, the Danish Minister for Development Cooperation Ulla Tørnæs and the Norwegian Minister of International Development Nikolai Astrup invite you to further explore the tension between risk and opportunity arising from applying new digital tools to combat corruption.
Introducing the session’s topic, the Danish Minister will present the publication “Code to Integrity”, an easily accessible overview of some current cases of using digital tools for anti-corruption that are available to governments today. Her Norwegian co-chair will introduce Norway’s Digital Strategy for Development Policy that sets out to support partner countries to apply digital tools, including for anti-corruption., and present United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ newly established High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation in which Minister Astrup is a Panel Member.
Following these introductions, the panellists will share concrete experiences and emerging practices of deploying digital tools to combat corruption, keeping in mind both benefits and costs, opportunities and risks.
During the session, a few selected entrepreneurs from the ‘Code to Integrity’ publication will present their digital tools, inspiring the discussion with concrete use cases and exposing the participants to real examples of digital avenues to anti-corruption.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dong_Shim/publication/247531048_E-Government_and_Anti-Corruption_Empirical_Analysis_of_International_Data/links/56d803f608aebe4638af6790/E-Government-and-Anti-Corruption-Empirical-Analysis-of-International-Data.pdf?origin=publication_detail
