Problems start small – but how do they stop?

How do you get rid of things like corruption and excessive bureaucracy at higher levels when they’re the norm for kids growing up?

Two stories from a local university:

(1) My friend was once handed an exam from a teacher with a price written on the cover – to get a passing grade, students could either give satisfactory answers to the questions or pay the teacher this price.

(2) At a friend’s graduation ceremony last week, she went up front to get her diploma and they wouldn’t give it to her because she hadn’t returned her university ID card. When she ran over to the main office to pay the 2.4 lei ($0.20 USD) it cost to rectify this, they told her it wasn’t the proper time of day to do such a transaction, so after four years of studies, she couldn’t get her diploma with her class.

Moldova’s one of the more corrupt countries in the world – the World Bank places it in the bottom 25% of nations for control of corruption. My Lonely Planet guidebook even recommended bringing US $5 bills to pay off police with when unreasonably harassed on the street for being foreign. That hasn’t happened to me yet, although one of my Peace Corps friends has suggested we avoid certain well-patrolled areas when we’ll be speaking English. He was once taken down to the police station for no real reason and held there for hours until some sort of official U.S. embassy representative could come to his rescue.

As much as people complain about the U.S. government and other institutions we’re subject to, we’re pretty lucky that these groups usually do seem to have our best interests at heart and do their best to carry out their jobs in a just, efficient manner. (Maybe I’m too much of an idealist – of course some groups are much better served than others in the U.S. – but I do believe we’re incredibly lucky to be where we are.) And when things work less-than-ideally, we have so many watchdog and activist organizations fighting to get our nation on track – in the past few years, my good friends have worked for groups fighting everything from housing injustices to defamation of the LGBT community.

Is this the most effective way to change culturally-ingrained problems – by 3^rd-party organizations going after the “bad things” in society? Should the international community increase its efforts to combat corruption in Moldova? Or perhaps, as one of my Stanford professors’s research has suggested, could corruption be combated by economic development? He argues that while corruption can be detrimental to development, the converse may be even truer: economic underdevelopment itself may actually be a major driving factor behind corruption. When there aren’t as many opportunities to prosper through legitimate channels, there’s more incentive to compromise morals and make money any way possible. If this is the case, maybe the best way to combat corruption is to grow the economy like the UNDP’s trying to do here.

I think that to combat problems this ingrained and persistent, a multi-pronged approach is necessary. Yes, overall economic development will help, but it may not be a panacea. In fact, the World Bank lists it as one of five elements of an effective anticorruption strategy:

1. Increasing Political Accountability

2. Strengthening Civil Society Participation

3. Creating a Competitive Private Sector

4. Institutional Restraints on Power

5. Improving Public Sector Management

It sure takes a lot of work to change the world, doesn’t it?