[{"bbox": [81, 146, 1156, 1017], "category": "Table", "text": "<table><tr><td></td><td>yet to be fully established.</td><td></td><td></td><td>Office was also created following pressure from citizens and civil society, who can be expected to continue to push for its operationalisation. To mitigate against the risk, the Action has been designed to include a high level of flexibility, including a brief inception phase to allow implementers to determine the degree to which the Office has been established and what its needs are (many development partners have expressed interest in supporting it) and a mid-term review to determine progress and re-allocate funds to other activities and institutions if no progress has been made. When it comes to the ICBs included in the Action - CHRAJ and NCCE - the programme includes funding to assist them to implement their constitutional mandates even where funding remains low.</td></tr><tr><td>Communication and information</td><td>Risk 4. Corruption is so ingrained in society, through practices such as gift giving, nepotism and vote buying and selling, that public education and awareness will not be enough to change practices.</td><td>Medium</td><td>Medium</td><td>Research and consultations suggest that some corrupt practices are so ingrained that merely passing laws or strategies will not lead to attitudinal and behavioural change. Recognising that changing attitudes and behaviour requires extensive efforts and protracted periods of time, the Action specifically includes support to CHRAJ and civil society and the media (in cooperation with NCCE) to begin or continue activities aimed at bringing about such change, specifically targeting the youth where attitudes and behaviours are less likely to have already become entrenched.</td></tr></table>"}, {"bbox": [91, 1016, 1147, 1445], "category": "Text", "text": "**Lessons Learnt:** The previous EU programme in this area - Accountability, Rule of Law and Anti-corruption Programme (ARAP) ran from 2016 to January 2021 with a budget of EUR 20 million. ARAP was evaluated during 2021 and was positively assessed overall. However, the evaluation found that the design of ARAP was too ambitious given the complexity of corruption issues, key stakeholders' capacities, poor collaboration among public institutions, and the longer timeframe required to realistically change behaviour. ARAP also did not anticipate bottlenecks related to coordination (vertical and horizontal) among institutions or lead to or establish a coherent and comprehensive problem-driven approach among institutions. The focus on both the demand and supply sides led to a fragmentation of activities between various institutions and civil society actions (which were separately funded via a DFID-led programme - STAR Ghana - where the EU had little say on which organisations were supported and for what). While various campaigns to raise awareness of corruption were conducted, this did not lead to increases in the number of officials prosecuted at local level. ARAP made a strong input in institutional capacity enhancement in the area of education, prevention and prosecution through capacity building activities, development of the secondary policies innovative tools in each institution, but a common methodological approach among key institutions is not yet harmonised and articulated for creating a concrete and visible link where one action leads to the next level in the chain until the anti-corruption loop is closed."}, {"bbox": [91, 1470, 1147, 1615], "category": "Text", "text": "The design of the current programme is mindful of all of the above lessons and actively addresses them: the focus has been narrowed to primarily focus on anti-corruption and accountability (thus contributing to enhanced rule of law), the number of institutions has been reduced to focus on those specifically empowered to address corruption and accountability, all criminal justice institutions involved have been included with support to building linkages between these and addressing overlapping mandates, and support to civil society and the media is more integrated"}, {"bbox": [1026, 1679, 1143, 1704], "category": "Page-footer", "text": "Page 15 of 28"}]