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30 Diagnosing Corruption in Ethiopia
reviewing primary and secondary documents (audit reports and disbursement
records, for example). The interviewees included the following:
• federal officials (from the Ministry of Health [FMOH], Federal Ethics
and Anti-Corruption Commission [FEACC], and Office of the Auditor
General, among others)
• regional officials from Amhara and Tigray (the Bureaus of Finance,
Regional Auditors General, and Regional Health Bureaus, among
others)
• woreda health officials from a rural woreda in the Amhara region;
• public sector health workers such as pharmacists, nurses, doctors, and
technicians
• nongovernmental representatives such as journalists, NGO staff, foreign
agency staff, and patients at visited facilities.
We also extracted useful quantitative information from the Woreda
and City Administrations Benchmarking Survey (FDRE 2008), the
Financial Transparency and Accountability Perception Survey (Urban
Institute 2009), and Demographic and Health Surveys (Central Statistical
Agency [Ethiopia] and ORC Macro 2001, 2006).
The findings presented here represent our informed judgments based
on this information and our experiences in other countries. We crosschecked
the information from interviews with alternative sources whenever
possible and gave more credence to views that were based on
firsthand experience. In terms of geographic coverage, a number of interviewees
said that conditions in Amhara and Tigray were better with
respect to corruption than in other regions, particularly in remote rural
areas. The informants told us that these two regions had better systems
for managing finances, personnel, and supplies than other regions where
capacities were weaker and oversight more limited. These comments
suggest that the findings here should be interpreted as a conservative
estimate of the extent of corruption experienced at the regional and
local levels.
Public reforms and changes in foreign aid are proceeding so quickly
that many of the findings here may also be outdated and should be
interpreted accordingly. Ethiopia has been implementing a new public
procurement law since 2005 and is implementing
• civil service reforms (such as BPR)
• a new health management information system