NotInMyCountry

NotInMyCountry.org was founded by an international group of concerned citizens who were tired of seeing 7 out of 10 countries in the world suffer under the severe burden of corruption. We are students, lawyers, journalists, business people, human rights activists, security specialists, academics, and technology and communications experts. We believe that many of the world’s problems – poverty, environmental degradation, undereducation, lawlessness, and inequality – may often be traced back to corruption.

To date, many local and international institutions have tried to tackle this problem through investigative research and writing – highlighting the issue and drafting reports detailing where problems exist. Sometimes, they even discuss how these issues might be resolved. Their work, however, has generally focused on systemic change, based on the premise that repairing institutions will lead to fewer individual acts of corruption. We would call this a “top-down” approach, and we believe that it has not produced the results we would expect after so many years.

At NotInMyCountry.org, we employ the opposite strategy, a “bottom-up” approach. We believe that only once individual corrupt acts diminish will institutional change occur. Put another way, we believe that the system will become less corrupt when corrupt individuals are held accountable for their actions – or fear that they will be held accountable if they continue to engage in corrupt acts. Our focus, therefore, is on the individual.

Holding corrupt individuals accountable, however, has not been easy over the years, and the main reason has been fear. Fear of those in power. Fear of repercussions for complaining. Fear that seeking justice is a waste of time. In the 7 out of 10 countries where corruption is a severe problem, democratic institutions and checks and balances are weak, and most people fear that they have no real option to seek restorative justice when someone exploits them.

We at NotInMyCountry.org seek to remove that fear, which university students often feel when they want to report or complain about an incident of corruption that they have experienced. We therefore have created a safe, secure, and anonymous space online where students can attack the two-pronged problem of quiet corruption and hard corruption by holding corrupt individuals at their universities to account. We will use the information we gather to publicly punish those who engage in corrupt activities and at the same time reward those who excel at their positions and who work hard not to break the public trust.

Our work targets universities because university students are the future leaders of this country. If students learn at university that they must buy their grades with cash and bypass bureaucracy by selling their bodies, their resulting cynicism will persist into their future careers. If they instead are empowered to hold abusers to account, the world will benefit for years to come.

We hope you can support us in our efforts to achieve this goal. Please use our site and promote it to your friends and family. By turning the spotlight on corrupt individuals, you can ensure a better future for your generation and for those that follow you.