Call for Innovations: Doing Business with Integrity

Doing Business with Integrity incentivizes the private sector to play a leadership role in the development, application, and scaling of innovations to counter transnational corruption, a particularly damaging type of corruption that involves political and economic elites operating through global networks to move money and commodities across borders. This includes corruption that facilitates trafficking in commodities, occurs in global supply chains, or accompanies money laundering, for example.

Efforts to address transnational corruption may focus on a single country, such as a national reporting mechanism for transnational corruption, or across multiple countries, such as a global reporting mechanism. Indeed, one-country initiatives can counter transnational corruption if they address cross-border dynamics and elite networks. An idea that proposes to address corruption in multiple countries does not inherently qualify as countering transnational corruption.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Countering Transnational Corruption Grand Challenge for Development (CTC Grand Challenge) invites private sector entities and consortia or partnerships that include private sector entities to apply with innovative concepts to counter transnational corruption.

Tracks

• Track One calls for innovations from private sector entities and/or consortia or partnerships including private sector entities that support collaboration and/or insights from behavioral science to counter transnational corruption as follows:
  • Collaboration: The CTC Grand Challenge team aims to support collaboration, especially collective action, to counter transnational corruption through initiatives by and/or partnerships with private sector consortia such as business/industry associations, networks, partnerships, coalitions, alliances, and initiatives. USAID defines collective action as an intentional and agreed-upon process that engages interested parties to take joint actions in support of shared objectives.
  • Insights from behavioral science: The CTC Grand Challenge team seeks innovations that incorporate insights from behavioral science to counter transnational corruption. Behavioral science pays special attention to the social, psychological, and economic factors that affect what people think and do.
    • One area of behavioral science focuses on social norms, which can have a significant influence on behavior. In anti-corruption initiatives, a focus on social norms aims to change the behavior of a target group by changing social norms that make corruption acceptable or expected. Examples of social norms approaches might include: facilitating group deliberation and reflection, publicizing trendsetters and champions, creating a new reference group, encouraging public commitments or declarations, comparing performance to peer groups, supporting social norms marketing through information campaigns, supporting role models, and changing laws or regulations.
    • Applying insights from behavioral science has the potential to strengthen anti-corruption efforts but is still in the early stages of development and evaluation. The CTC Grand Challenge team considers applying insights from behavioral science to anti-corruption efforts to be innovative in and of itself.
• Track Two calls for innovations from private sector entities and/or consortia or partnerships including private sector entities that counter transnational corruption and align with one or more of USAID’s Anti-Corruption Policy objectives:
  • Constrain opportunities: The CTC Grand Challenge seeks innovations that reduce opportunities for those with entrusted power to engage in corrupt behavior, including both actions that private sector entities take to address internal corruption risks and efforts they take to affect changes more broadly in their operating environments. Examples might include innovations that increase supply chain due diligence and traceability; address legal and procedural deficiencies; strengthen beneficial ownership requirements; facilitate digitization of government services; and effective advocacy for open procurement systems. 
  • Raise the costs: The CTC Grand Challenge seeks innovations that result in consequences for corrupt behavior – both as a means of accountability and as a deterrent – by bolstering exposure of corruption (e.g., through hotlines or independent media reporting), supporting advocacy and coalition-building among like-minded businesses, and improving investigation and accountability tools and capacities. 
  • Incentivize integrity: The CTC Grand Challenge seeks innovations that create positive inducements for controlling corruption and improving governance in the public and private sectors by spurring collective action against bribery in high-risk industries, publicly recognizing integrity and cultivating a race-to-the-top, promoting adherence to global norms and standards, and driving investment toward environments experiencing historic anti-corruption openings.

Prizes

• Total cash prizes
  • $4,000,000
• Non-monetary prizes
  • Technical Assistance, Mentorship, Networking, and Global Visibility
• Funding Available:
  • Under this Call, the CTC Grand Challenge team will award up to $4 million in grants. It may fund innovative solutions at any of three stages of maturity: Ideas, Prototypes, or Validation and Scaling. Each funding tier is described below. Innovators should submit concept notes for the funding tier that most appropriately fits their proposed solution’s stage of maturity. The CTC Grand Challenge team reserves the right to fund solutions in the tier and for the amounts that it determines are most appropriate. The total funding amounts will be refined during the pre-award assessment phase and final funding amounts will be determined in the award phases.
  • Funding Tiers:
    • Tier 1: Ideas ($50,000 - $100,000)
      • Idea-tier innovations are seeking to refine, develop, and/or test an early-stage idea that will result in an innovative approach, tool, or service. Idea-stage innovations have not yet undergone field testing.
    • Tier 2: Prototypes ($100,000 - $300,000)
      • Prototypes are innovations that are seeking funding to pilot and refine a new approach, tool, and/or service to gain an early assessment of its potential within the target context.
    • Tier 3: Validation and Scaling ($300,000 - $500,000)
      • Innovations seeking validation and scaling, are existing innovations with a successful prototype that are interested in testing and generating evidence of impact with potential end users and/or ready for scaling and growth, which may include reaching more people and/or expanding to new contexts or geographies. Doing so might entail forming new public or private partnerships and leveraging external funding.
• Additional Support:
  • The CTC Grand Challenge team will offer non-financial support, including targeted technical assistance, to innovators funded under this Call. The CTC Grand Challenge team will work with innovators to analyze barriers to the growth and impact of their solutions and develop support that provides a clear, actionable path for the awardee to reach technical, financial, and impact milestones. Key performance indicators established at the time of award will describe this plan.
  • Non-financial support is intended to help innovators (particularly for more nascent organizations and/for those new or newer to working with USAID) effectively and compliantly manage funding through this Call as well as ensure inclusive participation in this Call. In-kind support is designed to assist innovators, post award, to achieve their intended impact, and when/if available, will be budgeted across a cohort of innovators based on the determined needs of innovators.

What they will fund?

• The CTC Grand Challenge will fund activities that reflect innovative thinking; advance the range, depth, and impact of private sector actions to reduce transnational corruption; and demonstrate that anti-corruption efforts can be good for business. Innovation might take multiple forms, including:
  • New business models, especially those that make a business case for engaging in anti-corruption efforts;
  • New and creative ways of delivering or financing goods or services;
  • The development and testing of cutting-edge tools, technologies, and approaches;
  • New ways of increasing uptake of proven solutions and scaling to new places;
  • Cost-effective adaptations to existing solutions (e.g., certification measures);
  • Policy innovations,
  • Operational procedures that improve upon day-to-day business approaches;
  • Social or behavioral innovations based on insights from behavioral science; and/or
  • Data collection and rigorous evaluation to measure the social impacts of promising innovations.
• Innovations could include the development of new approaches, tools, or technologies, or build upon existing initiatives through adaption or scaling, such as:
  • Industry corruption reporting mechanisms or hotlines;
  • Transparency measures, including beneficial ownership transparency;
  • Technology prototypes for new platforms or tools;
  • Certification measures;
  • Integrity pacts;
  • Policy dialogues with government;
  • Shared due diligence; and
  • Compliance training along supply chains.

Period of Performance

• Innovations funded under this Call will have a period of performance between six and 24 months, with a proposed timeline to be included in the innovator’s concept note.

Eligibility Criteria

• Innovations submitted in response to this Call must come from a private sector entity or a consortium or partnership including a private sector entity or entities in the design and implementation of their innovation. Innovations supported under this opportunity will require private sector resource contributions (cash and/or in-kind) the value of which at least equals if not exceeds the amount of funding provided by USAID. Private sector resource contributions will be a requirement at the full application stage. Concept notes should demonstrate how these resource contributions will contribute to the success of the activity.
• The CTC Grand Challenge invites concept notes from legally registered local, national, regional, or international organizations, including, but is not limited to the following:
  • Private sector entities, including:
    • Commercial entities and their affiliated foundations;
    • Financial institutions, and intermediaries;
    • Business associations and cooperatives;
    • Micro, small, medium and large enterprises that operate in the formal and informal sectors; and
    • American, local, regional, and multinational businesses;
  • Organizations partnering with a private sector entity, including:
    • Non-governmental organizations (NGOs);
    • Grassroots, local and community-based organizations (CBOs);
    • Civil society organizations (CSOs);            
    • Faith-based organizations (FBOs);
    • International non-governmental organizations (INGOs);
    • Private universities and other academic institutions;
    • Research institutions and think tanks; and
  • Consortia that include the private sector such as business associations, cooperatives, and other existing forms of collaboration (submitted by one lead partner).
• Across innovator types, USAID encourages concept notes from organizations and private enterprises led by and/or serving women; youth; persons with disabilities; Indigenous Peoples; the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) community; and other marginalized populations.

For more information, visit USAID.