March 28, 2024 – Transparency International – Defence & Security (TI-DS) is excited to announce the start of work on the next iteration of the Government Defence Integrity Index (GDI), the leading global benchmark of corruption risks in the defence and security sector.
The GDI 2025 is TI-DS’s flagship research product and follows on from the GDI 2020. This latest iteration includes expert assessments of around 90 countries as well as the introduction of a gender perspective, recognising the nuanced impacts of corruption across different gender and underrepresented groups.
The GDI provides a framework of good practice that promotes accountable, transparent, and responsible governance in the defence & security sector. It is a useful tool for civil society to collaborate with Ministries of Defence, the armed forces, and with oversight institutions, to build their capacity in advocating for transparency and integrity.
Countries are evaluated by independent assessors who assess the strength of anti-corruption safeguards and institutional resilience to corruption in five key areas:
- Financial: includes strength of safeguards around military asset disposals, whether a country allows military-owned businesses, and whether the full extent of military spending is publicly disclosed.
- Operational: includes corruption risk in a country’s military deployments overseas and the use of private security companies.
- Personnel: includes how resilient defence sector payroll, promotions and appointments are to corruption, and the strength of safeguards against corruption to avoid conscription or recruitment.
- Political: includes transparency over defence & security policy, openness in defence budgets, and strength of anti-corruption checks surrounding arms exports.
- Procurement: includes corruption risk around tenders and how contracts are awarded, the use of agents/brokers as middlemen in procurement, and assessment of how vulnerable a country is to corruption in offset contracts.
These independent assessments go through multiple layers of expert review before each country is assigned an overall score and rank. This makes the GDI extremely rigorous in its methodology.
The amount of work required to produce the GDI means the new country results will be released in six waves:
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Middle East and North Africa
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Latin America
- Asia Pacific and South Asia
- Western Europe and North America
The first wave is provisionally due to be published in early 2025.
Notes:
The GDI was previously known as the Government Defence Anti-Corruption Index (GI), with results published in 2013 and 2015. The Index underwent a major update for the 2020 version, including changes to the methodology and scoring underpinning the project. The 2025 results can be compared with those from 2020 to get a picture of global trends in defence governance, and which countries are improving.
The GDI is a corruption risk assessment of the defence and security sector within a country, which assesses the quality of mechanisms used to manage corruption risk –and evaluating the factors that are understood to facilitate corruption.
It is not a measurement of corruption and does not measure the amount of funds that are lost to corruption, identify corrupt actors, or estimate the perceptions of corruption in the defence & security sectors by the public.
TI-DS has secured funding for the sub-Saharan African wave and is working towards securing additional support to cover the costs of producing the remaining five waves. We invite all stakeholders, including public agencies, multilateral organisations and INGOs, to get in touch via gdi@transparency.org to help support the remaining waves.