NISER Launches Corruption Reduction Research

Ibekimi Oriamaja Reports

A MacArthur Foundation Research Grant has been awarded to the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) for the empirical investigation of various definitional and social facets of corrupt behavior.

The grant’s goal, according to Professor Antonia Simbine, Director General of NISER, is to institutionalize behavioral change approaches for reducing corruption in Nigeria’s public sector. Simbine was speaking about actualizing behavioral change approaches for doing so.

Simbine remarked that the data from this study project would serve as the foundation for designing behavioral solutions for Nigeria’s public sector. The MacArthur Foundation’s intervention is structured on a three-year cycle that runs from September 1, 2021, to August 31, 2024.

Research and capacity building, designing behavioral solutions, institutionalizing knowledge, documenting, communicating, and disseminating are all concurrent and iterative activity streams on the project.

The NISER’s ABC series is a forum for knowledge interaction designed to promote discussions and bring ideas together to help move behavior change theory into reality.

The series kicks out with a weekend webinar on the subject of “Understanding and Analyzing Behavior.”

She claimed that the organization is promoting a paradigm change away from a conventional strategy and toward a behavioral and attitudinal approach to reducing corrupt activities in the public sector.

Simbine remarked that the agency is working around the clock to institutionalize behavior modification approaches in order to reduce corruption in Nigeria’s public sector during the webinar organized for the agency’s personnel and development partners and conducted in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State.

She emphasized that all hands must be on deck to raise awareness about corrupt practices in the public sector and stated that the agency would not give up on its mission to end them.

She also emphasized the establishment of a knowledge engagement platform for fostering discussions and bringing ideas together that will facilitate the shift from behavior change theory to practice.

The director general emphasized that one of the seminar’s goals was to examine the complexity-based map of Nigeria’s corruption phenomenon and devise creative approaches based on locally relevant knowledge, attitudes, and behavior in order to combat corruption.

Speakers at the conference pointed out, however, that the usual techniques of reducing the threat of corruption have had very little success and that behavioral and attitudinal changes would go a long way toward ending the practice.

They are hopeful that the administration will be able to minimize waste and theft in the public sector once interaction with key stakeholders has been completed.