A problem of morality or law?

Starting on July 15, 2007, Ukraine will see the beginning of entrance exams to higher educational institutions, a tense time for applicants, parents, and teachers. Unfortunately, higher education today is not a way to discover the world and ourselves or realize our potential but a matter of prestige: everybody with this particular idea applies to a university, even if their secondary education certificate mostly shows mediocre grades. How this is done is common knowledge.

Last Friday the Prosecutor- General’s Office also addressed the problem of corruption in higher education. The office claims to have solved 150 cases related to university-based bribery this year. Thirty-nine other criminal cases are pending. According to Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General Anatolii Medvedko, the main problem is that our laws are more lenient towards bribery and corruption in colleges and universities than in other sectors.

“In Poltava oblast a university lecturer received 32 bribes from 80 students, but he was only given a one-year suspended sentence,” Medvedko said.

His office says that educators usually take a bribe ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 hryvnias, and the overall figure (in all spheres) ranges from 10,000 to more than a million hryvnias. Bribery occurs practically in every region of Ukraine. The prosecutor’s office emphasizes that with the adoption of several laws now being drafted will force educational institutions to tackle this problem more diligently.

Attesting to the importance of solving the problem of bribery and corruption in Ukraine is the fact that even the US is worried about it and has allocated $3 million to help eradicate the problem. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has launched a special two-year project called Promoting Active Citizen Engagement (PACE) in Combating Corruption in Ukraine, and invites all civil society organizations to take part in a grant competition.

The project has three major components: 1) support for civil society anti-corruption efforts; 2) support for investigative journalism and other media anti-corruption efforts; and 3) monitoring of corruption trends and the results of government- and civil society-sponsored anti-corruption initiatives. The priority spheres of the projects’ implementation are the higher education and justice systems, regulatory procedures, and the delivery of government services.

According to the organizers, the goal of the grant program is to support practical results-oriented projects that stipulate the implementation of actions to prevent corruption and improve the transparency, accountability, and integrity of the government authorities; promote public interests for reducing corruption; enhance ethical standards in society; raise public awareness and promote a zero-tolerance approach to corruption; and mobilize citizens for active participation in anti-corruption campaigns.

The competition conditions state that any NGO can obtain a grant of no more than $15,000, for which it should fill out a special form, clearly stating the problem and concrete ways of solving it. All required documents should be transparent. The grantee must also contribute (in cash or in kind) at least 15 percent of the overall project costs from its own or other sources.

“We hope this program will help people overcome the stereotype that ‘everybody but me is fighting.’ We need people to be ashamed of taking a bribe,” said Volodymyr Kuprii, one of the project organizers.