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This essay in the Africa Development Indicators series aims to shed light on a different type of corruption. It introduces the term “quiet corruption” to indicate various types of malpractice of frontline providers that do not involve monetary exchange. This paper details how such practices are undermining Africa’s development by illuminating devastating malpractice:

• Denied an education because of absentee teachers, children suffer in adulthood with low cognitive skills and weak health
• The absence of drugs and doctors means unwanted deaths from malaria and other diseases
• Receiving diluted fertilizer that fails to produce results, farmers choose not to use any fertilizer, leaving them in low-productivity agriculture
• Indeed the widespread prevalence of big-time and quiet corruption in Africa significantly undermines the impact of investments to meet the Millennium Development Goals.
  
  Recommendations:
  

• It is important to raise awareness of the profile of quiet corruption because this malpractice has non-negligible long-term consequences
  
  
• the need for strong and highly motivated leadership in the fight against corruption, commitment and capacity of the national anti-corruption units to pursue operationally effective responses
  
  
• Increasing transparency in policy formulation and implementation that empowers citizens to raise the accountability of service providers
  
  
• The fight against quiet corruption requires tailoring policies to country circumstances, recognizing that priorities and responses may vary depending on different country conditions
  
  Conclusions:
  
  
• Difficulties in observing attendance and job effort, the lack of transparency and accountability, and the weaknesses of monitoring and enforcement inherent in public service organizations in developing countries imply that quiet corruption is likely to be equally insidious as big-time corruption
  
  
• Some sectors are more vulnerable to quiet corruption than others; the main determinants are the level of transparency and accountability in the sector
  
  
• The notion that corruption is generally ubiquitous and inevitable implies that it is an “accumulating process”: the more corrupt the system, the more it produces a downward spiral of malpractice.

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