In Uganda:
NotInMyCountry was founded by an international group of concerned citizens who were tired of seeing 7 out of 10 countries in the world suffer under the severe burden of corruption. We are students, lawyers, journalists, business people, human rights activists, security specialists, academics, and technology and communications experts. We believe that many of the world’s problems – poverty, environmental degradation, undereducation, lawlessness, and inequality – may often be traced back to corruption.
To date, many local and international institutions have tried to tackle this problem through investigative research and writing – highlighting the issue and drafting reports detailing where problems exist. Sometimes, they even discuss how these issues might be resolved. Their work, however, has generally focused on systemic change, based on the premise that repairing institutions will lead to fewer individual acts of corruption. We would call this a “top-down” approach, and we believe that it has not produced the results we would expect after so many years.
At NotInMyCountry.org, we employ the opposite strategy, a “bottom-up” approach. We believe that only once individual corrupt acts diminish will institutional change occur. Put another way, we believe that the system will become less corrupt when corrupt individuals are held accountable for their actions – or fear that they will be held accountable if they continue to engage in corrupt acts. Our focus, therefore, is on the individual.
