By Richard Messick
Global corruption costs trillions of dollars a year. Global prizes for anticorruption total just $7.5m.
If you’ve been around the anticorruption field long enough, you’ve probably seen them: the fearless reporters who uncover procurement scandals, the whistleblowers who refuse to stay quiet, the community organizers who stand up to kleptocrats and, every now and then, the spotlight moments when someone hands them a prize and says, “Thank you for your courage.”
At Accountability Lab, we lovingly call this “naming and faming” and it has been part of our DNA for almost 15 years. And honestly? It matters. Awards help bust through cynicism, amplify role models, and remind the world that integrity is alive and kicking. They energize movements and validate the people doing some of the hardest work on the planet.
But here is the thing few people talk about: the anticorruption award ecosystem itself. Who is celebrated? Who isn’t? And who sets the rules? Is the recognition ecosystem actually aligned with today’s corruption challenges? And crucially, is it investing at a scale that matches the global corruption crisis?
As anticorruption day approaches once again, we mapped more than 40 prizes connected to integrity, transparency, journalism, rule of law, and governance to understand the landscape. (List here.) What we found is both encouraging and deeply revealing.
What “Counts” as an Anticorruption Prize?
To make it into our analysis, an award had to meet one or more of three conditions: i) explicitly reward anticorruption efforts; ii) promote accountability, like investigative journalism or rule-of-law activism; or iii) advance integrity and good governance in a way that overlaps with corruption issues. Our dataset is not exhaustive by any means; information gaps, inconsistent reporting, and the invisibility of local or risk-sensitive prizes make comprehensive mapping difficult (please be in touch to add to it or help us improve it!) But even so, clear patterns emerge.
Where Awards Come From—and Where They Don’t
Let us start with geography. More than 58% of prizes are global. Another 22% are regional, and 20% are national. But the real insight is where these “global” awards are actually headquartered: overwhelmingly Europe and North America. There are clusters in Africa, Latin America, and the Balkans. Yet huge regions—South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, and the Pacific—are almost absent. In many of these places, public recognition can be dangerous, and language barriers or lack of connections to Global North networks keep nominees invisible.
This exposes a deeper truth: the anticorruption award ecosystem reflects the biases of the institutions that create and fund it. Most prizes are awarded by NGOs, foundations, universities or intergovernmental bodies. Two-thirds are funded by charitable organizations. That means northern civil society and donors largely decide what “excellent” anticorruption work looks like, which stories are worth global attention, and who deserves recognition as a role model.
What Awards Actually Offer
At the same time, more than 60% of prizes include material support—money, grants and fellowships. While we collectively need to be careful not to reinforce the idea that financial reward should be the incentive for honesty, these prizes can be lifesavers for small CSOs or independent journalists. At the same time, they need to be meaningful. Some prizes offer around $10,000—helpful but hardly transformative. Others, like the Mo Ibrahim Prize or Skoll Award (which is for social entrepreneurship but winners have included anticorruption activists) deliver millions over several years. Symbolic prizes (the remaining 40%) still matter, but visibility without sustained support can be a fleeting boost rather than a safety net. Most awards are annual (80%), with a few every other year or awarded as deserved on a rolling basis.
Hidden beneath all this is the application burden. Many awards require lengthy forms, essays, letters, translated evidence, or reference checks. For activists under digital surveillance or understaffed nonprofits trying to stay afloat, these requirements can be unrealistic. Recognition should not be out of reach because someone lacks English proficiency or a grant-writing volunteer.
Who’s Getting Recognized?
We categorized winners as: local actors: grassroots activists, community journalists, small NGOs; elite actors: high-profile leaders, heads of state; and institutional actors: major media outlets, large organizations. Nearly half (47.5%) of the awardees are local actors, a promising sign that frontline integrity work is being seen. Only 12.5% go to elites and 10% to large institutions. The remaining prizes are rewarded to a mix of local and elite actors.
Major gaps are obvious: youth-led anticorruption work is almost invisible, movements and informal networks get almost no direct recognition, and digital corruption, online civic space, and mis/disinformation barely appear. In addition, no awards focus specifically on sectors like health, education, or climate—despite corruption’s devastating impact in these areas.
Interestingly, winners rarely overlap across awards. This is positive in that awards are not necessarily “piggy backing” on each other to celebrate the same people, but it also indicates that there is no shared framework for what “excellence” means. This may reflect the broader challenge of defining anticorruption itself.
The awards we nalysed tend to reward investigative journalism and media freedom; rule of law and human rights; and leadership and integrity. These are foundational, of course. As corruption evolves- with AI-generated disinformation, crypto-enabled graft, digital surveillance and so on- they do not cover the full picture. Emerging threats are yet to be recognized by the prize ecosystem.
How Much Does the Ecosystem Actually Invest?
Here’s where things get sobering. After converting all disclosed values to USD and taking midpoints for ranges, we estimate the total annual value of the anticorruption prize ecosystem at ~$7.5 million per year. This is, frankly, tiny. By some estimates corruption drains more than $5 trillion globally every year. So the prizes available for integrity equal 0.015% of the amount stolen from citizens. Criminal networks, autocrats, and kleptocrats are scaling up. And yet the global recognition-and-support ecosystem for integrity champions amounts to pocket change. Even a 100x increase—to $750 million annually—would still be a bargain in terms of global benefit.
The Risks and Unintended Consequences
Awards can also carry risks we need to acknowledge: awards can improve safety through visibility but can also increase threats for activists in repressive contexts. Celebrating individual heroes can overshadow collective movements; and short-term recognition without long-term funding can create burnout. We must design recognition in ways that protect and empower—not expose or overburden—frontline defenders.
Where Do We Go From Here?
If integrity is worth celebrating—and it absolutely is—we need a prize ecosystem built for today’s realities. That means more Global South–led awards and awards that focus on emerging corruption threats, anonymous or pseudonymous awards for at-risk activists, prizes for movements, not just individuals and real investment: multi-year funding paths, not one-time checks. Ultimately, prizes should not only reward integrity—they should sustain it.
A Final Thought
Imagine a world where anticorruption champions are not just applauded but fully supported. Where courage is not punished but protected. Where recognition comes with resources. That is the prize ecosystem the world deserves. And one worth building—together. We should remember that on Anticorruption Day on December 9th and every day.
