Establishment of anticorruption network of non-governmental organisations

Project has ended

The establishment of anticorruption network of NGOs in Estonia is being coordinated by TI-Estonia to strengthen the anti-corruption attitude of civil society organizations and to develop a larger supporting platform for the fight against corruption. etecting corruption and bent relations tends to be challenging, but yet mandatory to prevent and fight against corruption. Corruption in its complexity is an issue that can only be solved with a good cooperation between the governmental institutions and civil society. Therefore TI Estonia finds that greater engagement of non-governmental organizations is mandatory step on the way of curbing corruption. One of the key prerequisites of network’s successful functioning is that the members have a good knowledge of corruption related issues. Therefore regular seminars are being held for members, first to give them basics of corruption and later keep them updated with changes in legislation etc. Also an electronic newsletter is being circulated periodically to communicate relevant information continuously. The aim of educating civil society organizations is to foster their development into watchdogs that are able to point out corrupt relations in society and prevent them from occurring. The network enables to analyze the risks of corruption in different spheres and economical branches as NGOs and especially umbrella organizations are in the position to give sufficient and impartial information in their field of competence. It also makes it easier to point out and lead the attention of authorities to the problematic fields in sense of corruption and transparency through the network as sometimes a single organization might not have the capacity to do that. Variety of different opinions and shared capacity makes it also possible to develop proposals of legislation amendments. At the moment 25 NGOs with different backgrounds have committed themselves to contribute to the activities of network and the number is constantly growing. The Ministry of Finance has demonstrated an interest in the possibility of involving the network in the supervision of allocation of EU structural funds. Project is financed by National Foundation of Civil Society