CIPE’s Afghanistan work included these highlights:

Afghanistan Supreme Court Justice Mohammad Omar Babrakzai listens to participants at a corruption roundtable. He noted, “This roundtable is a major achievement; the Supreme Court of Afghanistan supports such initiatives and will stand behind the recommendations made today.”

• Tashabos, CIPE’s high-school entrepreneurship program, expanded to include a 12th grade curriculum in 2010. In total, 33,000 students – more than half of which are girls – at 44 schools in Bamyan, Kabul, Nangahar, and Parwan provinces gained valuable entrepreneurship skills.
• In May 2010, CIPE released a survey of 738 Afghan businesses from six of the country’s largest cities – Herat, Jalalabad, Kabul, Kandahar, Khost, and Mazar-e-Sharif – which measured business leader opinions. The survey found that security, corruption, and lack of electricity were the top three concerns of the business communities in these six cities.
• In 2010, CIPE conducted more than 10 training sessions for members and senior legislative aides of the Afghan National Assembly and an additional 24 training programs on market economics and democratic governance for 258 members of Provincial Councils across Afghanistan. Topics included good democratic governance, market economics, combating corruption, budgeting and financial management, taxation, trade and globalization, and the informal economy.
• In August 2010, CIPE’s anti-corruption conference in Kabul drew over 100 individuals from 21 provinces. This conference was the culmination of a series of roundtables. Participants issued a communique outlining a set of 16 policy recommendations and calling on the government to enact immediately a set of comprehensive anti-corruption laws.

Anti-corruption work in Egypt resulted in the following accomplishments:

• The survey results and policy papers broke the barrier of publically discussing corruption in Egypt, or even acknowledging its existence.
• The four policy papers were the first direct, public effort to address corruption in Egypt by an independent group of prominent Egyptian business associations, civil society organizations, multinational corporations, political parties, academic institutions, and media outlets.
• The corruption survey was highlighted in several issues of Al Masry Al Youm, Egypt’s largest independent newspaper. Additionally, a widely-read article by Saad Hagrass, managing editor of the influential business daily Al Alam Al Youm, analyzed the survey results and created a wider space for public discussion about corruption issues that continued in the media for nearly a month after the original article went to press.

Advocacy efforts in Iraq led to the following changes in 2010:

• In Anbar Province, policymakers have pledged to change laws the private sector indentifies that hinder economic growth. At a CIPE sponsored event in October 2010, a Provincial Council representative implored the private sector to “tell us what needs to be changed [in the law] and we will change it. That is our job.” This attitude is new to the province and directly countered old sentiments that local policymakers cannot change laws without national approval.
• In Basrah province, the Basrah Provincial Investment Commission has revisited their internal structure in response to private sector grievances that their response time to potential investors is not adequate.
• In the Kurdish Region, electricity coverage rates have increased from 40 to 53 percent because of reductions in rates and increases in investment led by the private sector.
• As a result of KBA recommendations, the Kurdistan government financed the region’s Agricultural Bank at $100 million in 2009. Farmers can access capital and land productivity has increased. Wheat production in 2010 increased from 180 kilos per dunum (a unit of land), to 240 kilos per dunum.

Corporate governance efforts in 2010 resulted in the following:

• In Yemen, CIPE and the Yemeni Businessmen Club created a task force with representatives from the business community, government, the media, and academia to strengthen corporate governance in the country – an unprecedented form of public-private cooperation in Yemen. With support from CIPE and utilizing expertise from other CIPE partners in the region, the task force created the first-ever Guidelines for Corporate Governance that was launched in March 2010. The Guidelines are already being used as a model for several family-owned companies in their efforts to address family governance and succession issues and business owners have requested assistance from task force members to help them draft company-specific guidelines.
• In Bahrain, CIPE played a key role in building momentum for finalizing and launching the Code of Corporate Governance in the Kingdom of Bahrain with the National Steering Committee on Corporate Governance in March 2010. The code is motivating companies to improve their governance practices in order to comply with new requirements that will enhance disclosure and democracy.
• In Tunisia, CIPE and the Institut Arabe des Chefs d’Entreprises advanced democratic values by utilizing the CIPE-supported Tunisian Center for Corporate Governance to train boards of directors and other stakeholders in governance principles. The training workshops are based on the Guidelines for Corporate Governance Best Practices, developed by CIPE and IACE in 2008, which encourages a business environment based on greater transparency and accountability.