Today, Saturday, April 24, 2021, Partners for Transparency organized a virtual youth debate entitled “The Role of Digital Transformation in Fighting Corruption”. On her part, Mirna Shalash, Executive Director of the Foundation, expressed the importance of the regional role played by the Foundation in the fight against corruption, the Foundation's interest in the values of integrity and transparency, and its effective efforts to raise awareness of the most important laws and frameworks governing corruption.

The debate was moderated by Zainab Zeidan, Program Coordinator at the Partners Foundation, with the participation of debaters from various Arab countries, including Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Palestine and Lebanon.

The debate came within the framework of the electronic campaign launched by the Foundation entitled "No to corruption" to raise awareness of the dangers of corruption and spread awareness about the most important regional and international agreements concerned with combating corruption and illegal practices, including the United Nations Convention against Corruption and the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption and others, and the role of digital transformation in Reducing and limiting the spread of corruption and working towards promoting the values of transparency, integrity and governance.

The support team presented the most important concepts that define corruption and the frameworks for combating it, and highlighted the importance of digital transformation in facilitating access to services without bribery and favoritism, and that it has an effective role in the so-called social accountability, indicating that there are countries such as Tunisia that have tended to digitize many services as a tool to combat Corruption and closing the door to any unfair practices.

While the opposition addressed the issue on the one hand that there is no connection between digital transformation and corruption, and they set an example in advanced countries in digital transformation such as Italy that have very high corruption rates, stressing that digital transformation opens new loopholes for corrupt people to practice dishonest acts that threaten cybersecurity and create The so-called electronic corruption.

The debate was followed by an open dialogue session that came out with several recommendations, the most prominent of which is to emphasize the importance of digital transformation in overcoming many unfair practices within institutions, such as bribery, forgery, favoritism and preventing access to reliable data. However, digitization is not the only way to combat corruption as it needs several mechanisms. Such as data control and infrastructure improvement, especially in developing countries.