The international anti-corruption community requires objective, trustworthy metrics to improve anti-corruption interventions and advocacy efforts. Global Integrity meets that need by assessing the laws, institutions, and mechanisms designed to promote accountability and curb corruption in any country.

Using local in-country journalists and academic researchers, Global Integrity produces a detailed scorecard of anti-corruption systems in nations worldwide, providing an actionable roadmap for reform. We do not attempt to measure “corruption,” which because of its criminal nature is effectively impossible.

Global Integrity assesses the existence and effectiveness of key governance institutions. We explore the gap between what is promised in law (de jure) and what is delivered in practice (de facto).

Our in-country teams of experts transparently score a set of 290 international best practices (the Integrity Indicators) which determine how well nations adopt and enforce anti-corruption mechanisms. Each indicator score is anchored to unique scoring criteria; backed by expert local commentary, references, and critical peer-review perspectives; and published on our Web site. These data are used to generate the annual Global Integrity Index, an accessible rating designed to spark internal dialogue and debate. Alongside this quantitative data sits a deliberately qualitative “Reporter’s Notebook” which describes, from a local journalist’s perspective, how the average citizen experiences corruption in day-to-day life.

This information is a powerful catalyst. Utilized routinely by aid agencies, local activists, journalists and academics, these assessments provide a clear roadmap for improving the institutions and mechanisms that fight corruption.

Existing corruption perception indices rely on aggregating third-party public opinion surveys, often opinions of foreign businessmen and businesswomen working in the country. These survey-based tools are a useful measure of the "output" of national anti-corruption efforts, reflecting how much a population trusts its government and perceives the level of corruption to be. Global Integrity however, examines the "inputs" to that same system: the national anti-corruption framework provided by the laws and institutions designed to fight corruption. The relationship between such governance "inputs" and "outputs" is a complex one. For instance, improving government transparency or media freedom may in practice reveal increasing numbers of scandals, potentially lowering public trust in government, even though the anti-corruption mechanisms themselves are improved.

We believe that understanding those "inputs" is essential because they can provide a specific action plan for reform. Governments cannot easily affect the “outputs” – what people perceive the corruption environment to be. But Global Integrity's peer-reviewed expert assessments provide a huge volume of information that can pinpoint specific, actionable points of intervention down to individual institutions, laws and their enforcement.

Global Integrity gathers this information from the field through an innovative Web-based collaboration system, successfully deployed in some of the poorest countries in the world. This customized system is redefining the limits of technology in development work and is being replicated by other NGOs in the field.

Global Integrity publishes via its website (www.globalintegrity.org ). Our research is actively promoted through press conferences, media reports and participation in workshops and conferences around the world. This network-distribution model ensures that in-country experts contributing to Global Integrity Reports themselves become promoters of the research findings.

Our work serves as source material to journalists seeking to contextualize reports on corruption and governance, and Global Integrity aggressively cultivates media partners. We also publish print materials, such as The Corruption Notebooks, a paperback companion to the Global Integrity Report.

Impact is measured in Web traffic, media citations, and event attendance. Web traffic is used to evaluate the need for individual research areas by comparing specific page loads and length of visits.

Media citations are tracked with news alerts and cataloged in a database. To date, Global Integrity research has been cited by 78 newspapers worldwide, as well as numerous wire services, magazines, Internet and broadcast outlets.

On the policy side, we conduct roundtable briefings with key stakeholders and policymakers around the world. As an example of this, following our January 2007 release, Global Integrity presented our findings to the World Bank, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the European Commission, a variety of think tanks, and multilateral anti-corruption meetings in Africa and Europe, among others.

Global Integrity builds networks of individual reporters and journalists, many of whom are well connected to local non-governmental organizations fighting corruption and are able to promote and properly contextualize our results. Our work informs these local anti-corruption efforts, but as an honest broker of information and as an organization that does not engage in advocacy, Global Integrity is not connected to any particular anti-corruption campaign. Instead, our goal is to help fill the information gap for both advocates and governments in order to facilitate honest, fact-based debate.

We maintain a number of essential partnerships with dozens of like-minded international NGOs who informally assist in recruiting additional in-country experts each year through their own respective networks. We could not accomplish our work without their assistance and support.

For example, Global Integrity country assessments play an important role in shaping the World Bank's Country Policy and Institutional Assessments (CPIA). These internal World Bank staff assessments significantly influence the World Bank's International Development Association (IDA) loan allocations. Eighty-one countries are currently eligible to borrow from IDA; those countries are home to 2.5 billion people.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a U.S. Government corporation which allocates aid based on a country's commitment to governance, has drawn heavily upon Global Integrity data and assessments. Global Integrity's assessments have also proven critical in the design of MCC's Threshold Programs, which support policy reform in developing countries, particularly in anti-corruption programs.

Civil society groups at the grassroots level also appreciate the scope and breadth of our work and the leverage it provides them when advocating for reform. G. Jasper Cummeh, program director for the Center for Transparency and Accountability in Liberia (CENTAL), observes that, "The depth of Global Integrity's work emboldens CENTAL and other civil society groups to confront our government with compelling evidence on the need for governance reform. Global Integrity's work is a clarion call for urgent action."

• Scaling up the number of countries covered. In 2006 we covered 43 countries; in 2007 we expect to cover 55; ideally we would like to cover the entire world on a bi-annual basis (80 countries a year on a two-year rotation).

• Applying our approach of using in-country expert teams with a consistent scoring methodology to specific sectors in countries, as well as at the local level. With the continued push to decentralize and push governance down to the local level, credible data and metrics and the local level, as well as for specific key sectors (procurement, taxes, judiciary, etc) will become even more crucial. Today, hardly any comprehensive, regularly updated data exists in this space for the vast majority of countries in the world.

At the time, aid agencies were suggesting a grand bargain: “more aid for improved governance.” Yet there was little information on corruption and governance produced by an entity without partisan, ideological, or financial agendas. Global Integrity was created to fill that void.

Beginning in 1999, Lewis worked with Nathaniel Heller, a CPI research fellow, and Marianne Camerer, a South African academic and anti-corruption expert, to create the first Integrity Indicators, designed to provide context to corruption scandals which appear spontaneous, yet are rooted in failures of the governance framework. Global Integrity incorporated as an independent NGO in September 2005.

1) Effectively communicating the depth and variety of information produced by our researchs and journalists.
2) Managing a rapidly expanding network of people spread across the world, often in poor and remote regions.