Last year Engineers Against Poverty achieved several noteworthy achievements, from bringing together influential thinkers at OECD’s Anti-Corruption Forum to highlighting a lack of transparency in UK infrastructure to launching final parts in our mega-sports event series. Some of these achievements came up in the posts you enjoyed reading the most in 2021 which are summarised below.
1. Why corruption exists in Mega Sports Events?
Our top performing post concerned our work on the impact of corruption in Mega Sport Event (MSEs) infrastructure as part of our MSE Insights series. Published in January, the post pointed to five reasons why the sector is so prone to corruption, the main impacts in terms of monetary loss and human lives, and recommendations centred on principles of transparency and collaboration. Later in the year Construction Today published our article on the MSE Insights series which was selected as one of the editor’s highlights.
2. What are the key tools and approaches to build infrastructure back better?
Second in line is our feature advertising our event at the OECD Anti-Corruption Forum in March. This brought together influential names from government in Ukraine and Colombia, alongside private sector and multi-lateral bank representatives to explain how technology and advances in private finance can meet economic challenges ahead.
3. Greater civic participation needed in Mega Sport Event infrastructure
We released our final MSEs insights paper in May, outlining the value of civic engagement. Our post here summarised the current challenges which inhibit accountability in the events such as the non-profit status afforded to event organisers and what can be done to promote public participation.
4. EAP responds to UK green paper on transforming public procurement
When the UK opened up a consultation on its green paper on transforming public procurement we were delighted to contribute, providing our niched expertise on improving procurement in infrastructure, drawing on the EAP hosted programme CoST – Infrastructure Transparency Initiative to do so. Our post here summarised our contribution, calling for measures to help increase the fact that less than 40% of the CoST standard the Open Contracting for Infrastructure Data Standard (OC4IDS) is commonly disclosed to the UK public.
5. Why engineering is vital to achieving the sustainable development goals
Whilst published in 2020, our final top performer shows a continued interest in why engineering is key to the sustainable development goals in a post-Covid-19 world. Based on a submission to the Institution of Civil Engineers, the article highlights the role engineers can play in developing quality, nature-sensitive and contextually appropriate infrastructure in low-income countries.