CAF Supports Colombia in New Law to Improve Transparency and Curb Corruption

As a promoter of public integrity policies, CAF—development bank of Latin America—showed its support to the Government of Colombia by participating in the enactment ceremony of Law 2195 of 2022, on Transparency, Prevention and Fight against Corruption.

“For us, as a development bank, public integrity policies are a key instrument for improving the quality of life the people, since they allow us to better allocate funds, with criteria of efficiency and accountability,” said Carolina España, CAF’s representative in Colombia.

Over the past four years, CAF has been advancing an ambitious agenda in Latin American countries to support the adoption of good practices in the area of integrity. In 2018, for example, it created the Directorate of Digital Innovation of the State, which contains a public integrity line of work to support Member States in the use of digital technologies and data reuse policies in order to prevent, detect and investigate cases of corruption.

To improve the scope of these initiatives, not only in Colombia but in other Latin American countries, España announced that CAF will launch before March 2022 a report (called DIGintegridad) where a detailed state of the art on the issue will be presented to governments, private sector representatives, members of civil society and stakeholders of the anti-corruption ecosystem, which seeks to become a toolbox that outlines how to adopt digital technologies in the fight against corruption, and that CAF can offer to governments.

“Colombia can count on CAF’s full support in this task, in terms of technical assistance, loans, specific cooperation and any aspect that requires our expertise as a development bank,” España said.

During the meeting, Colombian President Iván Duque Márquez stressed that the new Law is based on a work that distinguishes the principle of collaboration between the branches of public power set forth in the Constitution, whose harmonious collaboration can make structural changes in the fight against this scourge.