Published today, our Annual Report celebrates the achievements of our teams and partners around the world that we are most proud of in 2020. It also reveals some of the hurdles we were challenged to overcome together. There are many of both, and a lot more stories and highlights in between. 

This year's report offers deep dives into some of our key focus areas.

A newly published Compendium of Jurisprudence on Extinción de Dominio will enable Peruvian judges, prosecutors and other law enforcement actors to assess progress and legal precedents in the implementation of Peru’s 2019 law on non-conviction based confiscation (Extinción de dominio).

More than 860 public officials from 20 cities across Peru have completed a five-week virtual training course of the Subnational Public Finance Management (PFM) Programme, which our Lima-based team implements under the Swiss-Peruvian SECO Cooperation.

A Swiss-funded programme to strengthen public finance management at the local and regional levels in Peru has entered its second phase, with a virtual launch event gathering high-level diplomats and subnational government leaders.

How do you carry out training for 5,000+ public officials across Peru during a pandemic? Our local Public Finance Management team explained how they achieved this at the country’s recent National Innovation Week. The answer: social media and asynchronous communication.

Thanks in part to the unconventional use of social networking tools like Facebook and WhatsApp for distance learning, the training initiative is now snowballing. Joint workshops have been taking place with government ministries and civil society organisations across all regions.

In these times of global crisis, strong and transparent management of public finances is even more essential. How governments manage their money has a real and immediate impact on peoples’ lives. It affects critical issues such as access to education and whether hospitals have enough trained staff and medical equipment.

In early April, more than 770 public officials across Peru took our latest virtual training course on public financial management (PFM). This free seven-week course is part of a programme financed by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) to strengthen standards of PFM in 11 subnational governments.

We are delighted to release our Annual Report 2019 – view it here.

The report highlights our achievements in the past year, but it also looks forward to the future. It is a chance to reflect on how corruption and governance are changing around the world and how we are adapting to new challenges. It is also a chance to thank, once again, our partners and donors for their unwavering support. 

Last week’s blog about corruption risks in natural disaster situations triggered some interesting feedback. Many observers are seeing the same as I am in the international response to the covid-19 pandemic – namely, that there are striking similarities with the response to earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters in the past.