Afghanistan corruption: How one town battled a shoddy school and won - CSMonitor.com

Afghanistan corruption: How one town battled a shoddy school and won - CSMonitor.com: "While sending the powerful to prison has its benefits, teaching ordinary Afghans how to resist the powerful may prove to be more successful. Proponents of this approach argue that could do more to establish Afghan democracy than much-hyped elections.

A group of Afghans held a successful sit-in after they discovered a contractor using shoddy bricks and cement on a girls school. The protest came about as part of a quiet effort to help citizens keep officials and businessmen on the straight and narrow.

“The quick approach is we are going to put the bad guys in jail. This is nice, but symbolic. A second bad guy will come,” says Lorenzo Delesgues, director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA), whose training led to the sit-in. “The answer is to create social pressure.”"