New exchange spaces for State-Owned Enterprises

State-Owned Enterprises are a large part of global business, providing services and essential goods such as electricity, infrastructure and health services, among others. However, State-Owned Enterprises have specific corruption risks linked to their proximity to the government and the sectors in which they work.

In different Latin American countries, similar conditions lead State-Owned Enterprises to face common challenges when promoting business integrity, which represents a valuable opportunity to explore successful solutions within the region that can be replicated in other countries.

That is why, with the aim of establishing a communication mechanism based on the exchange of good practices and the discussion of common challenges in terms of integrity, the first online exchange space for State-Owned Enterprises in Latin America was created by the Alliance for Integrity.

The first exchange was held on Friday, September 28th, where 8 organisations from 4 different countries participated: five Argentines, one Brazilian, one Colombian and one Mexican belonging to different sectors such as: energy, trains, airports, waste, and others.

For this first meeting, each State-Owned Enterprise introduced itself to the others, presenting the activities that it carries out in its country and highlighting in integrity matters both the good practices it has developed as well as the challenges and issues that it would like to explore. For example, some wanted to know about methodology for the measurement of impact in the implementation of integrity programmes, risk analysis of State-Owned Enterprises and good anti-corruption practices of other similar organisations.

The companies that participated in this first meeting agreed to schedule these exchange spaces periodically, where they will share good practices in terms of integrity and visualise the steps to follow.

During the first session, some topics of intersectional interest came up: what for some companies was a good practice was for others a topic that they were interested to know more about and go deeper into. For example, one State Property Company commented that it would like to know more about the content and creation of the Ethic Codes and it turned out that another of the participating companies had a high level of experience in Ethic Codes.

The second meeting of this group was held on November 29th where Lorena Giurovich of CEAMSE, the Ecological Coordination Metropolitan Area State Society (an Argentine public company), presented as a good practice the creation of its Integrity Programme.