Not In My Country: Rebuilding a Secure, Scalable Anti-Corruption Participation Platform

Ingenuity was engaged to rebuild Not In My Country's anti-corruption platform from a university-focused crowdsourcing site into a more usable, secure, multilingual and extensible platform capable of supporting partner organizations across countries and sectors.

The challenge

Not In My Country (NIMC) had already demonstrated that digital tools could create public visibility around corruption and poor institutional performance. Its original platform allowed university students in Uganda and Kenya to rate lecturers and administrators and submit corruption reports. Public research, however, documented an important gap between interest and participation: the platform attracted substantial attention, but comparatively few users completed high-consequence reporting actions.

By the time of the rebuild, NIMC also needed to move beyond a site designed around universities in two countries. The existing experience had documented weaknesses in interface design, usability, performance, search and ranking. The next version needed to support qualified anti-corruption organizations operating in different countries and sectors, while preserving strong controls around privacy, abuse prevention and sensitive reporting.

The challenge was therefore larger than a visual redesign. NIMC needed a platform architecture and user experience that could make difficult civic actions easier to complete while supporting multiple organizations, languages, data sets, administrative boundaries and security requirements.

Our approach

Ingenuity was engaged for the full website rebuild, including design, development, testing, security review, launch and post-launch assistance. The work combined product and service-design thinking with platform engineering.

Simplify high-friction civic journeys. Reporting corruption and rating performance required users to find the correct country, organization, unit and individual before submitting sensitive information. The redesign focused on reducing steps, making calls to action clearer and improving search and navigation.
Design for a network of partner organizations. Instead of treating NIMC as one centrally managed site, the platform was designed to support partner organizations with their own country, sector, branding, content and administrative access while remaining connected to the NIMC platform.
Build privacy and trust into the workflow. Corruption reports involved sensitive evidence and identity data. The scope included authenticated reporting, abuse controls, controlled routing to relevant organizations and encrypted communication using organization-specific keys.
Make structured data operational. Partner organizations needed to import large lists of institutions, organizational units and individuals, handle duplicates and errors, associate images, update records recursively and export data when required.
Support international participation. Common platform pages were designed for multiple languages, while partner-specific experiences needed configurable translated content and language-consistent navigation.

The solution

The resulting solution was conceived as a reusable anti-corruption participation platform rather than a single-country website. Its information architecture connected countries, sectors, partner organizations, institutions, organizational units and individual profiles so that users could move from a broad public issue to the specific person or institution they wanted to rate or report.

Key capabilities in the rebuild included:

country and sector discovery, search and browsing;
partner-hosted branded instances using NIMC infrastructure;
nested organizational hierarchies for institutions, departments and sub-units;
performance-rating and corruption-reporting workflows with moderation and abuse controls;
secure routing of sensitive reports to NIMC and relevant partner organizations;
partner onboarding, role-based administration and large-file data import/export workflows;
multilingual content and interface support;
petition, campaign, donation and crowdfunding pathways;
rankings and a proposed corruption-reporting index to turn aggregated participation into public visibility;
responsive web delivery, analytics, staging and production environments, testing, migration and technical documentation.

The design treated the platform as shared civic infrastructure: a common core that could preserve consistent behavior and governance while allowing local organizations to operate in their own language, geography and sector.

Evidence and outcomes

The strongest evidence around this engagement is the combination of demonstrated public demand and clearly documented participation barriers. NIMC reported that its original platform launched across 38 Ugandan universities with 3,841 staff records and later expanded into Kenya, eventually approaching 10,000 staff records. The organization also reported more than 97,000 site visits. Independent research similarly found significant awareness and traffic, but much lower levels of active reporting.

That gap explains the strategic value of the rebuild: scale was not only a server or database problem. It required simpler journeys, stronger trust signals, better search, safer handling of sensitive information and an architecture that could be reused by organizations operating in different environments.

Public sources reviewed for this draft do not provide independently verifiable post-launch metrics that can be attributed specifically to Ingenuity’s rebuild. For that reason, this case study does not claim conversion improvements, reporting growth or other quantified project outcomes. Instead, it documents the engineering and product challenge: transforming an early anti-corruption crowdsourcing site into a more extensible, security-conscious platform model for civic participation.