About Integrity Pacts: what
Integrity Pacts and industry sectors
Integrity Pacts are frequently used in public tenders with high corruption risks, such as infrastructure, education, health, water and road construction.
Integrity Pacts have been used in at least 22 different industry sectors, as shown in the Basel Institute’s Integrity Pact database. Of the 32 countries that have implemented Integrity Pacts, 21 have used them to oversee multiple public procurement projects in more than one sector.
A rough analysis of the Integrity Pacts in our database shows that the industry sectors that have most frequently used IPs are:
- Infrastructure
- Education (including education infrastructure)
- Health (including health infrastructure)
- Water
- Road construction
- Waste management
- Cultural heritage
- Transport infrastructure (including railways/metros/trams)
- Defence
- Municipal procurement
- Construction
Specific sectors
-
Infrastructure: Given the high level of corruption risks in the infrastructure sector, it is no surprise that this is where Integrity Pacts have most frequently been piloted in at least seven countries. The G20 has also recommended the use of Integrity Pacts in their Compendium of Good Practices for Promoting Integrity and Transparency in Infrastructure Development, published in 2019.
-
Water: Transparency International and the Water Integrity Network have collaborated to promote Integrity Pacts specifically for the water sector. See their joint publication Integrity pacts in the water sector: an implementation guide for government officials and more details about the project on the Water Integrity Network Integrity Pacts web page.
-
Defence: The concept of defence integrity pacts, promoted by Transparency International’s UK’s Defence and Security Programme, has been piloted in Colombia and Poland.
-
Health: The experience in Honduras using an Integrity Pact to monitor all public procurement of medicines has been acknowledged as an important anti-corruption tool for the health sector. See case study: Medicines procurement in Honduras - How Integrity Pacts helped bring transparency, fair competition and value to a deeply corrupt sector.
Since 2017, the Basel Institute and Banknote Ethics Initiative (BnEI) have collaborated to promote the use of Integrity Pacts to oversee banknote procurement.