To better fight transnational corruption, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC) are launching a new initiative to strengthen collaboration between investigative journalists, academic researchers, and data scientists.
Seismic shifts in investigative journalism and the wider information landscape have led to an abundance of real-world data on secret and illicit financial activity, from leaks, public disclosures, and commercial sources. Extracting value from this data, however, depends on harnessing greater processing and analytical power.
The new Illicit Finance Data Lab (the Lab) will connect journalists with researchers so that both groups can more effectively use data to expose and understand corruption and dirty money flows.
In the coming months, the Lab will identify datasets and projects that could benefit from joint work by teams of researchers and journalists, and help these groups to combine their complementary skills. To encourage more cooperation of this kind, OCCRP and ACDC will reach out to a wider community of media and academic organizations, and offer practical guidance, training, and networking opportunities.
“OCCRP is sitting on a treasure trove of data. To tackle dirty money flows, we need new strategies for unlocking the knowledge it contains,” said OCCRP’s Chief of Impact Alexandra Gillies. “The Illicit Finance Data Lab can bring together that data with different types of expertise and methodologies, leading to stronger journalism and research that benefits the public interest.”
“ACDC demonstrates that empirical corruption researchers can help investigative journalists achieve powerful results, through not only their subject matter expertise but also their data processing capabilities,” said ACDC Co-Director Michael Hornsby. “Through the Illicit Finance Data Lab, we are excited to broaden the community of collaborators and increase our collective capacity to expose and undermine corruption.”
The Lab builds on OCCRP’s ongoing collaboration with the universities of Exeter and Oxford, ACDC’s work with the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF), and a two-day workshop on researcher-journalist collaboration held last year. Across these exchanges, participants expressed a clear appetite for more collaboration.
Supported by the U.K.’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the initiative marks an important step toward scaling up models of journalist-researcher cooperation across the anti-corruption ecosystem.
For more information, or to inquire about collaborating, contact [email protected].