Four members of Tanzania’s Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) have delivered three weeks of intensive training workshops to fellow PCCB staff. The trainers are PCCB officials who graduated from the “train the trainer” programme of the Basel Institute’s International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) in 2017.

In the context of a multi-centre research project, the Institute and its partners seek to map the manner in which informality is associated with the resilience of corruption. In this innovative project, researchers shift the focus away from analysing the implementation of formal legal frameworks, regulations and policies to concentrate on informal actions and practices that may be effectively taken into consideration where conventional anti-corruption interventions have failed.

The beginning of this year marked a growing interest in ICAR’s Train-the-Trainer programme in financial investigation and asset recovery with launches in Romania and Tanzania. The TTT programme comprises 4 to 5 successive training workshops, which are delivered over a period of several months. Potential local trainers are selected and trained to deliver similar workshops to their peers in the future, thus ensuring the sustainability of the project.

ICAR continues to work closely with a series of partner countries increasing their autonomy in the fight against financial crimes and money laundering as well as in recovering stolen public funds. ICAR’s current partner countries in the context of its capacity building services include Bulgaria, Romania, Tanzania and Uganda. 

Sustainable capacity building at a national level is a key activity of the Basel Institute's International Centre for Asset Recovery. Train-the-Trainer (TTT) programmes play an important role in the process. Between January and September 2017, ICAR experts delivered a series of practical training workshops on Financial Investigations and Asset Recovery in Tanzania to nearly 100 investigators and prosecutors, four of which were also trained to become certified trainers.

Alternative title: Dismantling networks of corruption: challenges and opportunities in reforming informal governance in Tanzania.

This Tanzania country report is part of a research project funded by the Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Programme of the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) and the British Academy.