Thank you, honourable member.
At the beginning I said that we formed a network of parliamentarians against corruption. It's actually the first network of parliamentarians that was formed in the world against corruption. Subsequently, others have been formed, including GOPAC, which was formed later. The African parliamentarians network is the first that showed that members of Parliament could be involved in the fight against corruption.
Partly it was my background. Before I went to Parliament in 1996, I was the Inspector General of the Government of Uganda, charged with fighting against corruption. That is similar to anti-corruption commissions in other countries. When I went to Parliament, I found that there was a role that Parliament plays, the oversight role, and I thought it was not playing that role fully. So I tried to see how the oversight role could become an anti-corruption tool and how Parliament could itself, as an institution, to be utilized in the fight against corruption.
You asked how Canada had assisted us. Canada assisted us in forming the network. We came together, members of Parliament from ten African countries--basically, at that time, members who were in the budget committees and in the public accounts committee. I was, at that time, chairman of the public accounts committee and the finance committee. Because of our role, we had seen through reports of the Auditor General, through examining the budgets and how they are managed, that Parliament could ask questions that would lead to unearthing acts of corruption.
In my role as chair of the public accounts committee, we introduced an innovation in our public accounts committee, and it is still continuing now, that when we were sitting as the public accounts committee, we also had police officers sitting with us from the criminal investigation department, so that if the committee found any established criminal elements in their investigations, the police officers could immediately open a case file. They could continue their investigations and continue reporting to us, and if they found that indeed a crime had been committed, they would assemble enough evidence to charge the culprits. Then they would go ahead with the court process, and so on, and we would report accordingly to Parliament.
For all of this, actually the stimulus came from interaction with the Parliamentary Centre of Canada. Our initial funding was both funding from the World Bank and from CIDA through the Parliamentary Centre. Since then, we have continued to receive funding from CIDA.
We now have a network in 18 parliaments in Africa, and there are about six coming on board. A lot of the funding is Canadian funding, so Canada has actually assisted us in being able to transform the parliamentary role of oversight into an anti-corruption tool.
So you will find that where the chapters are—we call it APNAC—where the network is, members who are in the public accounts or their various sector committees do look at the elements that may be connected with corruption in their particular work.
We have now added another concern, in addition to corruption, and that is corporate social responsibility, particularly with regard to revenues from minerals, oil, timber products, and so on, because there are a number of corporate social responsibility initiatives, which we think our countries can benefit from.
As I said, we are receiving funding from CIDA, and this too is benefiting from Canadian assistance.