GSIF Blog Post October 25 2020

October 23 Blog Post

Teammates: Rozhin and Brianna

  1. If you are the Chief of Police for Afghanistan, what solution would you develop to pay the cops that are actually working, reduce corruption, and boost their morale

If our team were acting as the Chief of Police for Afghanistan, we would ensure that systems were set in place in order to help address the issue of corruption and boost morale. To begin with, we would ensure that additional administrators are hired in order to manually regulate the payroll system, this way we can help prevent Ghost policemen. These administrators must not only hold themselves accountable but also hold their coworkers accountable for any acts of corruption. Yet, in understanding that the corruption present in Afghanistan is hierarchical, we must have a leverage point in order to prevent corruption at the administrative level. In this scenario, our leverage point would be increasing the countrywide literacy rate. By increasing the literacy rate we can:

  • Increase education and knowledge among the general public
  • Allow more Afghani citizens to be involved in their local services
  • Increase voter turnout and accountability

These effects experienced by increasing the literacy rate will all directly impact levels of corruption and the likelihood for corrupt officials to stay in power. Additionally, we can also implement activities within the bureaucracy in order to build deeper relationships, increase teamwork, and boost morale.

 

A second solution is to create an anti-corruption agency (ACA) that works independently from the police. The ACA will be held to an international standard of monitoring corruption; its workers will have to go through an arduous screening process before employment to ensure they are noncorrupt. One way to accomplish this is to ask employees to report their official tax and financial records each year. It is important that there is a single ACA, however. In countries where there are multiple ACAs – like Iraq – certain areas are overlooked. Additionally, multiple ACAs compete for the same financial resources so it would deter it from its true mission – to limit corruption.

 

  1. If you are the entrepreneur, what multi-final solution will you develop so that you succeed, your venture succeeds (takes water hyacinth off the lake), and the people living along the lakeshore also walk away happy. Please be specific on how your solution might function and precisely whom you would work with. For example, refrain from including vague stakeholders like entire communities.

 

One of our solutions will be hiring interested community members who want to work on removing the hyacinth from the lake and getting paid for it. This can especially work well with the fishermen or other community members who have boats so that they can remove the moss from different areas of the lake. This will work by her giving a portion of her profits in the shape of wages for the workers. It is important to have community members involved in the venture so that they don’t feel as if they are being excluded. Although this will likely result in having to let go of her current employees, it is more cost-effective and a good way to take advantage of the community members’ navigation knowledge of the lake since they know it best and they may know which area of the lake the hyacinths are most densely populated.

 

Another one of our solutions is for her to give a portion of her profits back to the community through charitable donations such as removing wastes and donating to their environmentally focused organizations. This will show community members that she is not just there for profits. Additionally, the community will be more willing to help her advance the venture forward if they notice she invests in the local community.  

 

In addition, another solution could be educating the community about the great advantage that she is adding to their environment by removing their water hyacinth infestation from their lake and improving their community’s fishermen’s access and ability to work on the lake without any charge to the community itself.

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