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CiFAR was founded in 2015 by Agatino Camarda, Laila Martin Garcia and Jackson Oldfield and formally registered as a non-profit association in Germany in May 2016. All three founders had worked in the anti-corruption field for several years, including on the issue of asset recovery and in particular in relation to North Africa.
They came together to found CiFAR after realising a gap existed in support for civil society – in a broad sense – to work on cases of cross-border corruption, both in terms of understanding how the process was supposed to operate and in making connections with civil society abroad. These issues were, and still are, particularly prominent in countries of origin, countries where the corruption originated, as the expose of large cases are often the first case local civil society has worked on.
The aim of CiFAR from the start was to address this gap and be both a capacity building and network-support organisation. In that line, since our founding we have worked to training civil society activists and journalists, networked together actors working on different parts of ongoing cases, developed tools and engaged policy makers on asset recovery reform.
While continuing in that role, we also have expanded our mandate as more and more actors have come onto the scene and as cases and returns became more varied. Our 2020-2023 Strategy envisions us to focus more on assessing new tools, imagining how returns could be more accountable and transparent, and on investigating and exposing cross-border corruption, while still staying true to our original goals.
You can read more about what we have done in our annual reports and read our Strategy to learn about what is to come.