Monitoring the Risk of Corruption in the MENA Region: What Are the Most Reliable Data to Address the Sustainable Development Goals?

Countering corruption is recognized by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) as crucial for effective and sustainable governance. Sample surveys are often used as the primary tool for monitoring corruption, making the evaluation of their quality essential for building a reliable evidence base strategy and achieving the UN SDGs 16.5. However, there is a lack of studies assessing the quality of corruption surveys in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. This gap can be attributed to various factors, including low prioritization, insufficient resources for anti‐corruption initiatives, the sensitivity of the topic, and language and cultural barriers. This article aims to assess the quality of corruption surveys in the MENA region by developing an ad‐hoc quality evaluation framework, MENA_QUEST_16.5. This framework includes criteria for assessing survey relevance, validity, accuracy, credibility, periodicity, and comparability to evaluate MENA surveys' effectiveness in capturing corruption events, in line with SDGs' requirement for measuring corruption. The framework is then applied to evaluate the quality of 19 national and cross‐national corruption surveys targeting countries in the MENA region. The study finds that the overall quality of MENA corruption surveys is good, but the number of national initiatives is low. Surveys often lack accuracy in depicting corruption issues, typically operationalizing corruption through only one or two questions. Details about corruption events (e.g., types of officials involved; types of benefits exchanged) are rarely investigated. Also, MENA surveys are not periodically conducted and suffer from a lack of transparency, with raw data generally unavailable or inaccessible. These results point to methodological shortcomings that should be addressed to obtain a reliable overview of corruption in the MENA region. Tackling these issues can improve the monitoring of corruption trends and inform anti‐corruption policy design and evaluation, to ultimately achieve the UN SDGs.