The corruption challenge needs first to be focused – disaggregated – into specific issues. Our experience is that there are 20-40 different issues in each sector, recognisable to those working in it. They can then be organised into an easily comprehensible format – a typology. The reforming group uses the one-page typology as the starting point for discussion and for analysing them: their scale, importance, context, avoidability and solubility. You can use this as the basis for building a shared understanding of the impact of the corruption.

Start by disaggregating the different corruption types that you are faced with. You can do this in the following way:

1. Looking this review at the typology of the different corruption issues in your sector. Use this as the basis of your identification of the corruption issues in your situation. If you find that the typology is not really suitable, then make your own one, by analogy with the ones you see in the CurbingCorruption site.
2. Gather data on the impact of these issues on your activities/outputs/policies/operations.
3. Decide if it would help to do a formal analysis of the corruption situation. There are two analyses you can consider. 1) Analysing the issues and the levels of corruption risk. This takes time but gives you a thorough baseline for your reforms. It also serves to show the level of danger and damage from corruption to staff and to the public. 2) An analysis of the economic and political pressures, including the levels of support and opposition that you can expect. This is called a ‘political economy analysis’.
4. Prepare for the later step in which you develop your Approach by thinking about which the best ‘entry points’ are likely to be – certain corruption issues, regardless of scale, merit being tackled first because they are the most likely to build constructive momentum and/or enable further reform.
5. Use this Focus knowledge to build up a shared understanding among your team/your colleagues/ your collaborators about what they corruption issues are and how they are impacting your operations. Everyone has a different view of what corruption is, so you use this analysis to bring everyone to the same understanding of them.
6. Draw on the international experience of tackling corruption in your sector – details can be found later in the review

You can read more guidance on FOCUS here.