Empowering women is key to fight corruption

Worldwide, today’s International Women's Day is celebrating the social, economic, political, and cultural achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women's equality. The Alliance for Integrity promotes a gender perspective in all its activities and is particularly committed to provide women with the necessary tools and knowledge to counter corruption in the economic system.

“Women are affected differently by corruption than men, and these differences are often hard to quantify and difficult to identify”, explains Marco Perez, Gender Coordinator of the Alliance for Integrity. “As there are only very few corruption prevention programmes in the private sector with a gender equality perspective, we make sure that all our tools and services respond to the differentiated impact that women entrepreneurs can have on their businesses just because of their gender roles”, he adds.

In 15 countries, the Alliance for Integrity has developed and implemented a wide range of services that empower and enable women in business to fight corruption and promote gender-sensitive corruption prevention in the private sector for women to exercise their rights equally. These include corruption prevention trainings and negotiations workshops for women entrepreneurs, exchanges between compliance experts and women in business, and formats that encourage women participation in discussing and addressing corruption issues in their line of business or work.

The cooperation between leading international actors in the field, convened by the Alliance for Integrity, allows creating synergies in the effort to promote integrity with a gender lens and engage policymakers to develop the necessary framework conditions.

With its activities, the Alliance for Integrity contributes to the overall objectives of Germany’s recently presented strategy for a feminist development policy, which renews the commitment both in foreign and in development policy to advancing the rights and equal participation of women. The policy is aimed at guaranteeing women the same rights and access to resources as men and working to ensure that women are equally represented and involved in political and economic decision-making processes.

“Together with our partners, we will continue to strengthen our commitment for gender-equal power relations and in this way also create a level playing field with equal opportunities for all”, states Marco Perez.

Learn more about the Alliance for Integrity’s activities on empowering women against corruption.