🌱 We've learned a lot over the last year. Through grounded data, honest conversations about what’s next, and learning we could actually put into practice, we've found some real direction.

In this edition of our newsletter we talk about the new system slowly taking shape and ...how this is the moment to rebuild the connective tissue that helps societies adapt, learn, and govern better.

📣 Reimagine with us. Read and subscribe to our newsletter: https://bit.ly/4qaIecl

📊 The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2025 is out, and it raises urgent questions about leadership and accountability.

Published by Transparency International, the CPI assesses 182 countries and territories, ranking perceived public-sector corruption from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 ...(very clean). This year, the global average has fallen to 42, the lowest on record. More than two-thirds of countries score below 50, and while 31 countries have made progress since 2012, most have stagnated or declined. The report links this to weakened checks and balances, shrinking civic space, and a lack of sustained leadership.

Across the contexts where we work — Mexico, Nigeria, Liberia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Mali — these findings reflect what our teams observe in practice. Corruption challenges are rarely about missing laws alone, but about how power is exercised in reality and whether accountability mechanisms can operate independently and consistently.

The CPI also requires careful interpretation. It measures perceptions, shaped by who can report, investigate, and challenge abuse. Independent media, civil society, journalists, whistleblowers, and oversight institutions make corruption visible. Where these actors are constrained – by repression, conflict, weak enforcement, or institutional capture – abuses of power are less likely to surface, even as harm escalates.

This helps explain several tensions the CPI brings into view. Some countries score relatively well on perceived public-sector corruption while being implicated in large-scale violence, prolonged conflict, or the systematic suppression of civic and political rights. These forms of harm sit largely outside the CPI’s methodology, yet they are fundamental to how power is wielded and how accountability is denied in practice. At the same time, much corruption operates across borders, through financial systems and secrecy structures that national-level scores do not fully capture.

🔗 Read the full CPI 2025 report:
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025

Accountability Lab Mali | Accountability Lab Mexico | Accountability Lab Pakistan | Accountability Lab Zimbabwe | Accountability Lab East and Southern Africa (ALESA) | Accountability Lab Nigeria

🏗️ WEBINAR: How Ukrainian businesses are advancing integrity and corporate compliance practices during conflict

Join us for on a conversation on the concrete patterns, sectoral dynamics, and the voices of ethical companies, from a report by Accountability Lab and the CGPA - Corporate... Governance Professional Association (CGPA) Ukraine.

The report aims to support a post-war reconstruction process in which business integrity is strategically leveraged to build a more transparent and resilient Ukrainian economy.

🗓️ Tuesday 10 February 2026
🕓 16:00 EEST/UTC+2 on ZOOM
🔗 Register: https://bit.ly/4aDH4l4

🛤️ ONE YEAR ON: Impacts of shrinking aid on local CSOs in the Global South

Twenty two participants from small and medium-sized organisations have shared their lived experience, organizational decision-making, and the longer-term implications for civil society ecosystems one year on ...from last year's US government aid cuts.

Our report captures their realities around institutional strain, ethical trade-offs, erosion of trust, and hard decisions about pivoting towards better funded issues. It also explores how organizations are adapting, what they’re giving up to survive, and how prolonged instability is reshaping civil society ecosystems, often in irreversible ways.

Crucially, CSOs shared recommendations on how donors can best contribute to supporting the development ecosystem as it now stands:

🔲 Prioritise core, flexible, multi-year funding
🔲 Avoid incentivising mandate drift through funding design
🔲 Support representative joint advocacy and ecosystem-level infrastructure
🔲 Treat civic space protection as a funding priority

👓 Get into the details of the full report: https://bit.ly/4bB419H