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Journal of Academics Stand Against Poverty

Academics Stand Against Poverty

Journal of Academics Stand Against Poverty (Journal of ASAP) is an open access international multidisciplinary journal published under the ISSN 2690-3458 (electronic edition) and ISSN 2690-3431 (print edition) by Academics Stand Against Poverty, a non-profit organization based in United States (EIN # 32-0324998).  Its mission is to publish high-quality work that can make genuine contributions to understanding and eradicating poverty and its effects in the real world. Such work will address the structural causes of poverty with an eye to the special challenges poor people face in such areas as nutrition, water, shelter, health and health care, sanitation, clothing and personal care, energy, education, social and political participation and respect, physical safety, family planning, environmental degradations and hazards, working conditions in employment and at home, navigating governmental agencies and the legal system, banking and credit, travel and transportation, and communications.  Journal ASAP is committed to ensuring that perspectives of the poor are adequately represented on its pages, and that these pages are accessible to all. The journal makes substantial efforts to include voices from the global South as well as from non-elite educational institutions and from organizations, agencies and communities that are working toward poverty eradication. It also aims for the widest possible reach by being entirely open-access: its one/two issues each year are free for download anywhere in the world without any requirement to provide personal information. Journal ASAP invites submission of original work and maintains a rigorous double-blind peer review system that provides constructive feedback to assist authors in presenting their work in a way that is clear, broadly accessible and practically useful. Journal ASAP is a pure Open Access Journal and allows the author to retain the copyright in their articles. Articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence (CC-BY) to allow others to freely access, copy and use research provided the author is correctly attributed.

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Journal of Academics Stand Against Poverty

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Article recordVersion of recordOpen accessVol 3 No 1August 17, 2026

‘Pandemic in a Pandemic’: Covid-19, Public Procurement Corruption and Illicit Financial Flows in Sub-Saharan Africa

Public procurement in Sub-Saharan Africa has become synonymous with corruption, and the region faces difficulty separating the two. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that for most Sub-Saharan countries,…

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Contributors

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  • Kenneth Mahuni

    Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Mauritius, Mauritius

Abstract

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Public procurement in Sub-Saharan Africa has become synonymous with corruption, and the region faces difficulty separating the two. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that for most Sub-Saharan countries, public procurement spending constitutes 15% to 30% of the national Gross Domestic Product. With the COVID-19 pandemic sharply escalating public spending, most Sub-Saharan African countries are experiencing unprecedented losses due to corruption in public procurement and the illicit financial flows that result. Corruption in public procurement in most Sub-Saharan African countries can be explained using a ‘3-Gear Corruption Model.’ This model depicts the foundational structures of corruption, namely private individuals, private institutions, public officials and state linked institutions. The model explains how the corruption dynamics play out and eventually feed into the public procurement ecosystem. Solutions to corruption and illicit financial flows must therefore acknowledge the relationship of these gears. The larger gear (1) is more influential than the smaller gears (2 and 3); therefore, more energy should be expended on addressing the bigger gear. Informed by this model, this essay proposes a number of actionable policies and measures to deal with corruption in public procurement, such as E-procurement systems, protection of civil liberties, and strengthening institutions. The government holds a central role in solving these problems, so success is highly dependent on the government’s commitment to dealing with the scourge of corruption.

Keywords

Covid-19CorruptionPublic ProcurementSub-Saharan Africa

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