Topic Guide: Corruption in Service Delivery

Complaints mechanisms can increase accountability by providing service users with the opportunity to provide feedback on the quality and quantity of the services they receive, as well as to report potential wrongdoing. Citizens can flag faults or errors in service delivery to authorities or report having paid bribes or being solicited to pay a bribe to receive a service.

Complaint mechanisms can either be integrated into channels established by governments or service providers or set up as citizen-led initiatives. Where the information garnered is made public and efficiently relayed to relevant authorities, complaint mechanisms can be used to pinpoint corruption hotspots and provide evidence of the scale of the problem in different sectors, districts and programmes. As well as raising awareness in government agencies about integrity risks, these tools can be embedded into feedback loops to improve the quality of service provided.