Today, John Hawkins, CoST’s Programme Director, participated in the “Building Integrity: Tackling Corruption Risk in Public Service Delivery and Infrastructure” at the Second Global Conference on Harnessing Data to Improve Corruption Measurement, co-organised by UNDP, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and the International Anti-Corruption Academy (IACA).

With infrastructure being one of the sectors most vulnerable to corruption, John shared how the CoST approach of multistakeholder working, data publication and validation, and civil society and business participation has led to CoST members globally delivering better quality infrastructure and saving money in the process.

Whether through data published on government procurement platforms, to experts carrying out physical independent reviews of projects, to civil society and business using the data to have a meaningful dialogue with government – CoST members have experienced the transformative power of infrastructure data using CoST’s international data standard. This has resulted in fiscal savings in Thailand of $70 million last year, to helping identify issues that closed the roads fund in Honduras that had been corrupted by cartels, to increasing the business environment in Uganda so that 8x fold more contractors bid for infrastructure projects within a year.

Looking forward, John then set out what he sees as the four issues magnifying the potential integrity risks we face, including:

• the increasing complexity of financing infrastructure,
• globally poorer performing infrastructure sectors such as energy,
• contractor payment delays, and
• corruption in climate change infrastructure funding.

Alongside CoST’s existing partnerships with the UN and IACA, this event is also happening in collaboration with several organisations that CoST has close relationships with, such as World Bank, OECD, Transparency International, and the Basel Institute on Governance – alongside IMF, U4 Resource Centre and UN Global Compact. 

This event is part of several developments that CoST made this year to encourage anti-corruption and drive integrity, including Kaduna showcasing their work at OGP’s Anti-Corruption event, CoST’s MOU with IACA, participation in a session on curbing corruption at the TICTeC 2025 conference and Cali joining CoST to build on their existing anti-corruption achievements.