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This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

Water and Sanitation Program

Dirty Water: Joining forces to curb corruption in the Water Supply and Sanitation Sector

Submitted by Maria on Tue, 2009-04-07 09:12

World Water Day was celebrated on March 22 and to bid farewell to a month full of water related activities, the World Bank Institute and Transparency International launched the book “Improving Transparency, Integrity, and Accountability in Water Supply and Sanitation” in an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on April 1, 2009.

More than 1 billion people around the world live without access to safe, potable water, in part because of poor governance and corruption. To raise awareness on issues such as embezzlement of funds, bribes for access to illegal water connections, manipulation of meter counters, and collusion in public contracts, the World Bank Institute, together with Transparency International, developed this book to provide a useful tool for diagnosing, analyzing, and remedying systemic corruption in the water supply and sanitation sectors.

This books stems from the twin capacity building programs carried out by WBI and the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) in Honduras and Nicaragua in September 2007, previously discussed at this blog.

Fighting Corruption in the Water Sector -- 2 Success Stories

Submitted by Maria on Thu, 2008-07-17 14:28

Corruption in the water sector is a root cause of the global water crisis that threatens billions of lives and exacerbates environmental degradation, according to the new “Global Corruption Report 2008: Corruption in the Water Sector” released by Transparency International.

The World Bank Institute (WBI) is taking the lead in fighting this corruption in two Central American countries where both the World Bank’s Governance Indicators and the Corruption Perception Index of TI indicate that corruption is common in the public administration and the delivery of basic services including water.  A capacity-building program organized for both Honduras and Nicaragua in September 2007 has had a positive impact on how both users and practitioners look at this challenge.