Integrity Action

Helping citizens challenge corruption

DevelopmentCheck is a ground-breaking app empowering people living in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Public services or development projects sometimes suffer because they are not being run as well as they should be.

“These failures may be caused by corruption, fraud, incompetence, or a lack of oversight. Whatever the cause, the real result is that communities do not benefit from the services and infrastructure that were planned for, budgeted and committed to.” said Bethan Turner, Integrity Action.

“If we reduce this failure rate, it dramatically reduces waste in public resources and it would be the equivalent of channeling billions of additional funds into development around the world.”

Our finalists, Integrity Action, have created DevelopmentCheck, a cost-effective tech for good solution to alleviate and eliminate some of these problems and to support communities to get the best out of projects.

It is training ordinary people to monitor projects and services, identify any problems and upload real-time data onto their app.

By bringing together citizens, contractors and governments they are making a real difference to thousands of people’s lives. Integrity Action is inspiring them to work together and identify problems and, importantly, find solutions.

So far DevelopmentCheck has trained 1,917 community monitors. In turn, they have monitored 611 projects, to the value of $868,843 and benefited over 587,211 citizen. Impressive figures.

They are working closely with a wide-range of partners to from NGOs to Civil Society Organizations.

These partners are helping them to get access to different communities and promote their work. By providing local people with training in integrity, they are inspiring citizens to become monitors. This knowledge is making the public demand greater openness and integrity from project managers and service providers.

Currently they are working on improving the app, making it quicker and adding more functions. They also want it to be used by more people, so are looking to add more language options and make it more accessible for different groups, like disabled people.