Citizen-driven approaches for combating public procurement corruption in Uganda's local government systems: an empirical survey

Abstract

Corruption in public procurement has been a menace to the innocent poor citizens through denial of better services. While many good legislation and institutional frameworks have been set in place to fight corruption in Uganda, the results remain disappointing. The recent procurement reforms in Uganda (from 2003 to date) are yet to yield substantive results to this end. In this paper we advocate for the use of citizen-driven approaches (CDAs) as a strategy for addressing the public procurement corruption malaise in Uganda's local governments. Drawing from empirical findings from over 1,000 randomly sampled respondents in the four regions of Uganda, the paper also examines the contradictions associated CDA and suggestions on what governments ought to do if they are to achieve benefits from this approach. We propose social accountability (SAc), a process of constructive engagement between citizens and government in order to improve performance in the use of public resources.