Professional Experience:
When donors commit money to fight poverty and save lives, it matters that the money is used as intended. Unfortunately, this is often not the case, as I have found in my 12 years working on fraud and corruption in international aid. I have investigated multi-million dollar frauds for the World Bank and Global Fund; I have advocated for reforms as Senior Director at Transparency International; and I have worked to reform the internal control and assurance systems as a Senior Risk Specialist and now, as a Senior Anti-Corruption Specialist in the Ethics Department at the Global Fund. I have lived and worked in the field (Sierra Leone 2002 and Rwanda 2003), so I appreciate the reality that graft is difficult to beat. But as our private sector counterparts' best practices demonstrate, proper incentive alignment, assurance mechanisms, controls and sanctions can materially decrease graft, even by half. If you sense, quite correctly, that graft impacts over 50% of international aid, then smart anti-corruption efforts start to matter.