Integrity Clubs: a model first launched by CERC in Uvira to transform Congolese schools

On 8 December 2017, under the Students Acting for Honesty, Integrity and Equality (SHINE) project, funded by NORAD and Sida through Integrity Action, CERC launched Integrity Clubs in 20 secondary schools in Uvira territory. The aim: to introduce students to democracy and good governance, initiative, responsibility and the joint management of public goods, and to train 300 students as community integrity monitors.

With the DevelopmentCheck app, students, parents and the community obtained key information on their schools – water and toilets, libraries, pupils per class, teachers’ qualifications, budgets and spending – and raised problems with school management boards. Between 2017 and 2020, 810 students in 54 Integrity Clubs in Uvira and Bukavu were trained and helped fix an average of 32% of the problems they reported. At the Itara Institute, where 590 students shared three toilets, their dialogue with the management led to repaired desks, three new classrooms and a block of eight latrines, with separate toilets for girls.

Having proved itself in South Kivu, the model was ready to scale up. In 2021, CERC won funding from the Global Partnership for Education, through Education Out Loud and Oxfam IBIS – US$361,361 in 2022 and US$68,816 in 2023 – for the Students Acting for Accountability and Quality of Education project in Kinshasa and South Kivu.

The results followed: 204 Integrity Clubs bringing together 2,250 students aged 14 to 19 in 150 schools, 138 school principals and 278 teachers trained, students reporting on their schools with the EduCheck app launched in March 2022 – and 33% of the problems they identified fixed thanks to their advocacy.

The next step was the law. In 2023, CERC and the African Parliamentarians’ Network Against Corruption (APNAC DRC) drafted two bills: one establishes Integrity Clubs, the other introduces an integrity education course in every secondary school in the country. APNAC DRC members of the National Assembly endorsed the initiative the same year, and in April 2024 CERC and APNAC DRC took the bill to the National Assembly.

The Integrity Club method – people who use a public service monitor it, report what goes wrong and work with those in charge until it is fixed – now underpins all of CERC’s citizen monitoring. After EduCheck for schools came GovCheck, developed in 2023 for citizens to document and report irregularities in infrastructure projects, and HealthCheck for health centres, alongside UNCAC Tracker for the DRC’s commitments under the UN Convention against Corruption. All follow the same principles: reports are checked before they are published, the people who report are never named, and a problem counts as fixed only once it has been checked on site.