Published originally in Alliance Magazine.
For a brief and extraordinary period, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) led the world in the fight against corruption. As the Agency’s Senior Anti-Corruption Advisor - and later Deputy of its Anti-Corruption Task Force -I had the privilege of helping shape this transformation, and witnessing firsthand what happens when a major donor makes anti-corruption a strategic priority.
It began with a frank admission: like all donors, USAID was not truly prepared to meet the scale and complexity of modern corruption - a transnational, systemic threat undermining development outcomes, democratic institutions, and global stability. As a bilateral Agency primarily structured to work at the country level, we had limited tools to tackle cross-country challenges. What followed was one of the most ambitious institutional undertakings in the Agency’s history.
Over four breakneck years, we undertook an audacious experiment: integrating integrity, transparency, and accountability across our programs; elevating corruption as a transnational development threat and a central Agency priority; and investing in the people, platforms, and coalitions that could turn our ambition into action. It was a moment of resolve and action: a rare and exciting flash of bold leadership, technical rigor, internal evolution, and partnership. And it worked, not because we had all the answers, but because we understood that dealing with a systemic challenge required a systemic response.
And then, overnight, this bold experiment - and USAID itself - was dismantled, leaving our programs and initiatives in shambles, and our anti-corruption partners scrambling.
This is a call to our fellow donors and multilateral partners: hold the line.
In a world where corruption continues to drain the resources of the developing world, where illicit financial outflows dwarf official development assistance by 7 to 10 times, donors cannot afford to continue to treat anti-corruption as a sectoral governance concern. In USAID’s wake, donors must keep the steady drumbeat of anti-corruption front and center, across global policy dialogues, country strategies, sectoral programs, and funding decisions. Below are some proposed anti-corruption priorities for a donor community in flux.
Priorities for the Donor Community
1. Boost Cross-Border Approaches
The most corrosive forms of corruption today are transnational and networked. No single government or civil society actor can tackle these forces alone. Donors must play the critical role of supporting and sustaining cross-border infrastructure to trace, disrupt, and hold accountable those who abuse the global financial system.
At USAID, our most groundbreaking programs were designed to strengthen this cross-border capacity. Our landmark Global Accountability Program helped countries cooperate regionally to follow the money through high-risk sectors, tracing illicit funds across jurisdictions, with new activities set to tackle corruption across the extractives, conservation crime, and political finance spaces.
Our Countering Transnational Corruption Grand Challenge partnered with civil society and private sector actors to test innovative approaches to uncovering and disrupting corruption that flows across borders. And through the Financial Transparency and Integrity Cohort - launched as part of the Summit for Democracy - we helped mobilize global commitments around beneficial ownership transparency, public procurement, and anti-money laundering enforcement that would increase the coordination of global anti-corruption systems.
We intentionally designed these efforts to complement our country-level programs while catalyzing the international architecture needed to fight globalized corruption.
The Takeaway: Donors should pair country-specific anti-corruption reform packages with deliberate and well-resourced efforts to build cross-border capacity, including support for regional networks, information sharing, and the interoperability of anti-corruption systems. By helping fund a stronger and more connected anti-corruption global dragnet, donors can help disrupt corrupt networks.
2. Back the Changemakers
Across the world, journalists, civil society actors, and reform-minded officials work at tremendous personal risk to expose corruption and push for accountability. They are
surveilled, threatened, harassed, and criminalized for their work, and they require both technical capacity and security.
At USAID, we recognized that protecting frontline actors was both a moral imperative and a strategic one. To create strength in numbers, we launched new programs like our regional Empowering the Truthtellers Activities in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, to create coalitions of investigative journalists and provide them with the tools, platforms, and legal support to pursue cross-border corruption investigations in sectors like critical minerals and infrastructure.
In Central America, our ReACCION program brought together civil society organizations, journalists, and activists from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, enabling regional coordination and collective advocacy against corruption and impunity.
Other programs invested in building technical capacity; in Ukraine, our Support to Anti‑Corruption Champion Institutions program strengthened civil society’s technical capacity to filter budget performance issues, scrutinize bank and procurement transactions, and support whistleblower channels.
Understanding the security risks, we backed these programs up with new investments designed to strengthen protections, including Reporters Shield - a groundbreaking global defense fund to protect investigative journalists from lawsuits aimed at silencing their work.
The Takeaway: Donors must continue to invest in the safety, sustainability, and amplification of the people risking the most to challenge corruption. This includes investing in both bespoke technical capacity and flexible and rapid support systems that are tailored to the risks these changemakers face.
3. Harness the Power of Coalitions
Anti-corruption momentum emerges when diverse actors, journalists, civil society groups, reform-minded officials, and business professionals come together with a shared purpose and mutual accountability. There is power in coalition building and strength in numbers.
Some of USAID’s most innovative anti-corruption work was aimed at supporting coalitions, and at aligning interests, amplifying voices, and helping to create collective resilience. In Peru, our Transparent Public Investment program helped establish regional integrity networks across the country; coalitions of diverse civil society leaders, business representatives, and public officials tasked with overseeing public investment projects. These platforms facilitated multi-party dialogue, co-monitoring of procurement, and successful citizen reporting mechanisms.
In Indonesia, our CEGAH program engaged a wide range of actors across the judiciary, executive agencies, law enforcement, civil society organizations across sectors, media watchdogs, and local businesses to collectively tackle systemic corruption risks through collaborative training, joint diagnostics, and national-to-local learning forums.
At the global level, our Memoranda of Understanding with the Open Government Partnership served as a way to align and build multi-stakeholder coalitions on open government efforts across the justice, public debt, and climate spaces.
The Takeaway: Donors should invest in coalition-building that weaves together diverse actors capable of strengthening accountability from multiple fronts. This includes models that bridge sectors, and funding for platforms where government, local organizations, journalists, and business can coalesce around anti-corruption reform, planning, and action.
4. Align for Collective Action
No single donor can take on systemic corruption alone. Yet the anti-corruption field has historically been dominated by fragmented efforts, with individual donors operating on parallel tracks, launching isolated initiatives, or overloading reformers with duplicative priorities and disconnected tools. What USAID demonstrated is that progress requires donors not just to coordinate, but to act in concert, aligning strategies, pooling resources, and pushing for policy reform together.
At USAID, we saw firsthand how working in this way could overcome fragmentation and unlock transformative momentum. We worked closely with our country missions to strengthen dialogue and cooperation among donors on the ground, while also exploring ways to scale our impact through global compacts and memoranda of understanding.
Through our Integrity for Development Campaign, we mobilized over half a billion dollars from fellow donors, channeling collective investment into cross-sectoral reformers, tools, and accountability systems. We partnered with global standard-setters like the Open Government Partnership and Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative to strengthen global norms and advance country-level implementation.
At the global policy level, and across key fora such as the OECD, we pushed for better information coalitions to inform the usage and visibility of donor anti-corruption assistance. Equally as important, we worked across the U.S. government to align our foreign policy tools, diplomatic engagement, and programmatic investments behind a unified anti-corruption agenda.
The Takeaway: Donors must move from coordination to collective action. That means tackling fragmentation, aligning programming, and working together to ensure anti-corruption remains a top global policy priority. Corrupt actors are working in coalition; so should we.
5. Institutionalize Integrity (or Make Anti-Corruption Everyone’s Business)
USAID’s most significant anti-corruption shift was actually internal. We transformed how the Agency understood and addressed corruption: not as a siloed governance concern, but as a systemic development threat undermining outcomes across every sector.
We started with establishing a high-level Anti-Corruption Task Force, reporting directly to the Administrator, to drive the charge and ensure results. We launched Agency-wide working groups to document how corruption distorted results across our work. Medicines and food aid diverted. Education funds siphoned. Natural resources looted. Infrastructure unbuilt. Together, we made the case: we could not achieve sectoral aims without countering corruption, and we could not counter corruption without tackling it from all sectors.
We undertook intentional mainstreaming, authoring USAID’s first Anti-Corruption Policy and building our first Anti-Corruption Center as a permanent technical hub. We launched a Guide to Countering Corruption Across Sectors to help staff embed integrity across efforts from health to environment, and initiated monthly Technical Clinics, which worked with 50+ country teams to design locally-informed anti-corruption strategies. We paired our global programs with a new Anti-Corruption Response Fund to allow us to respond quickly to opportunities or threats, and commissioned cutting-edge research to understand what actually works. To build interest, we hosted global learning events, and created internships and staff fellowships. And we connected these initiatives with implementation guidance to weave anti-corruption into USAID’s country and regional strategies, budgets, internal monitoring, and external reporting.
Slowly but surely, we mainstreamed anti-corruption into the Agency’s lifeblood by investing in our internal capacity and creating allies and stakeholders across the Agency and our almost 100 country teams. The results were astounding; a 250% increase in anti-corruption programming, including pioneering activities from Paraguay to Kosovo focused on addressing corruption in infrastructure, energy and health. Our colleagues across Global Health and Humanitarian Assistance took on the anti-corruption agenda as their own, launching their own training, initiatives, and guidance, and leading conversations on the world stage. We had hit our mark: successfully creating a cadre of internal champions for anti-corruption.
The Takeaway: Elevating and prioritizing anti-corruption requires donors to practice what they preach; making anti-corruption everyone’s business by embedding it into strategies, staffing, learning systems, and operations. Donors should actively build internal stakeholders and champions for anti-corruption, and equip sector teams, not just governance specialists, with the knowledge, tools, and buy-in to innovate and lead.
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USAID proved what is possible when a donor leads with urgency, ambition, and resolve. In this next chapter, it falls to other donors to pick up the mantle: to keep anti-corruption front and center, to invest in global systems and reformers, and to act in solidarity. The future of development depends on it.
Jennifer Anderson Lewis currently serves as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Accountability Lab, where she focuses on sustaining anti-corruption networks. For the past ten years, she served as USAID’s Senior Anti-Corruption Advisor and Global Lead for Technical Leadership and Programming, as well as Deputy of the USAID Anti-Corruption Task Force. Should I add in anything on TAI? Ms. Lewis also served as Senior Advisor for Open Government at the White House.