SheForChange: Women, Corruption, and Empowerment!

Yoojin Choi (Republic of Korea) is Head of IACA's Training and Capacity Development Department. She previously served in the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission (ACRC) of the Republic of Korea, where she launched the APEC Anti-Corruption and Transparency Working Group and organized the G20 Anti-Corruption International Conference.

In addition, she served in the Korean delegation for the OECD Working Group on Bribery and as a reviewer for on-site visits for New Zealand and Greece, and was in charge of projects with the World Bank and UNDP. She holds a Ph.D. in Education and Human Development from the University of Minnesota.

Prof. Dr. Elizabeth David-Barrett joined the University of Sussex in 2014 where she has been a Director of the Centre for the Study of Corruption from 2018. She was the Head of the Global Programme on Measuring Corruption at IACA in 2022-2023. Prior to that, she was at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Prof David-Barrett has published her research in top-tier academic journals including Governance, World Development, and the Annual Review of Political Science. She engages widely with policy-makers and practitioners and chaired the first Academic Roundtable of the G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group in 2020.

She has advised several governments on anti-corruption policy as well as training their anti-corruption professionals, worked with private-sector organizations on improving integrity, and authored several reports for Transparency International; she was formerly chair of Spotlight on Corruption, a UK-based anti-corruption NGO (2019-22). The expertise of Prof. David-Barrett on corruption is regularly sought by the media, including the BBC, Guardian, Financial Times, and Le Monde. She has a D.Phil, MSc and BA from the University of Oxford, and an MA from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. 

Dr. Ina Kubbe is a researcher and adjunct professor working at the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University, where she mainly researches and teaches corruption, migration and conflict resolution.  She is also a founding member of the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network - a network of corruption researchers from different disciplinary, national, and cultural backgrounds as well as of the new ECPR Standing Group on (Anti-) Corruption and Integrity. She obtained her Ph.D. in Germany; her thesis especially highlights the relationship between corruption and democracy.

 Ina has already published several articles, books and special issues in the field, and is currently publishing a new book on “Corruption and Informal Practices in the Middle East and North Africa”. She specializes in social science methodology and comparative research on empirical corruption, democracy and governance research, and political psychology. She had several academic stays abroad and also works as an international consultant for several organizations and institutions such as the European Commission, Transparency International, OSCE, OECD and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Education for Justice (E4J), where she has developed many university modules on anti-corruption.  

Prof. Sope Williams is a professor of public procurement law and the deputy director of the African Procurement Law Unit, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is an expert in public procurement law and policy in Africa; procurement in the multilateral development banks; gender-responsive procurement; emergency contracting; sustainable public procurement; anti-corruption law, and blockchain technologies. She has written and edited 5 books, over 60 peer-reviewed articles and has drafted some significant policy and research reports e.g., for the International Development Research Centre- Public Procurement and Women’s Economic Empowerment, the European Union and the UNODC, among others. 

Professor Williams has developed anti-corruption courses for UNODC (2019) and the UN Virtual School (2012) and served as an academic member in the World Bank’s Procurement Technical Advisory Group from 2008- 2011. She co-developed and teaches on the LLM and PGDip in Public Procurement Regulation and Policy at Stellenbosch University and is an editor of four international journals and a Vice-Chair of the anti-corruption committee of the International Bar Association. In December 2022, she was awarded the International Anti-Corruption Excellence Award for Academic Research and Education by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the State of Qatar.