11 October 2021

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

The UNDP ‘Towards a Professional and Citizen-centred Civil Service in Mongolia’ project funded by the Government of Canada and implemented with the Civil Service Council is organizing a series of workshops with ethics councils of ministries, government agencies and special state agencies.

The project is conducting trainings with heads and secretaries of ethics councils to raise awareness on, and prevent ethical misconduct via innovative approaches.

On the agenda for the workshops are interventions on mindset changes and lessons on ethics principles to enhance the agency of civil servants in taking responsibility for their actions, instead of solely focusing on rules and regulations for resolving conflict.

Furthermore, the workshops were facilitated by professional instructors, researchers, and advisors based on international practices and research on ethics principles from the University of Singapore.

Consolidated guidance on the operations of ethics councils was approved by the Civil Service Council in July 2021.

Of the 4,000 government agencies in Mongolia, 1,900 of them now have ethics councils.

This series of workshops is a follow-up from the ‘Towards a trustworthy civil service’ forum that was held under the auspices of this UNDP project with ethics council members, policy makers and academia in 2020 on a national level, where policy makers mainly discussed ethics and accountability within the civil service. This year, government agencies have formed ethics councils and are participating in the workshops to engage in collective knowledge sharing.

Organizers of the trainings encouraged civil service ethics councils to act as a pioneers, and a driving force of civil service reform in Mongolia.

The trainings officially commenced on 26-27 August, 2021 and continued until 1 October, 2021.