Abstract

Fredrik Galtung is the President and co-founder of Integrity Action, a London-based NGO that was founded in 2003 to find ways of making public services work better for the poor by reducing fraud and corruption and building integrity. Over more than 20 years, Fredrik has consulted on strategic corruption control and integrity building in more than forty countries. An estimated 25% of aid and government projects’ value is lost to fraud, corruption and mismanagement in developing and war-torn countries. Fredrik Galtung is re-defining anti-corruption work from top-down finger pointing to bottom-up promotion of integrity at the community level. Challenging the assumption that corruption can be tackled through punishment and compliance based tactics, he founded Integrity Action (IA) in 2003 with the primary objective of fixing problems through collaboration and constructive engagement. Integrity Action’s Community Integrity Building approach has helped local organisations monitor – and fix – hundreds of projects affecting around 5 million people across more than a dozen countries.

For those hoping to pursue a career in the ‘Third Sector’, especially amidst a broad range of organisations and agencies whose mandates can be loosely collected under the umbrella headings of ‘Human Rights and Social Justice’, ‘Conflict and Security’ or ‘Development and Humanitarian Aid,’ the terrain can be difficult to navigate. A sound academic training, the kind provided by Cambridge University, is important but certainly not enough to prepare students for the transition into working in this sector. Through a mixture of substantive discussion, personal reflection and practical advice, the CGHR Practitioner Series brings together high‐level experts working in these fields and creates a forum in which students and researchers can listen and ask questions about what this work actually involves, seek out reflections from experience on the dilemmas and challenges faced, and probe the skill set and experience needed to forge a career in these fields.

More about the CGHR Practitioner series: http://www.cghr.polis.cam.ac.uk/events/practitioner_series