What Do African Donor Sponsored Anti-Corruption Programmes Teach Us About International Development in Africa?

Donor sponsored anti-corruption programmes represent an increasingly large segment of international development assistance to Africa. While the ostensible objective of these programmes is to reduce African corruption, the generality of these programmes suggests other factors appear to motivate the design and implementation of these programmes. This paper attempts to assess the generality of these programmes by looking at the specificity, relevance and fit of proposed anti-corruption activities. The malleability of these programmes suggests that programme design draws from a mix of broader discursive fields and the genuine attempt to improve project performance and decrease corruption