WBI

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.

Some of you may know that I am in the process of moving on from the World Bank to the Brookings Institution.  Let me also share with you the email I have just sent out to many outside friends, colleagues and partners. 

Dear friends, partners,

As some of you may already know, I announced internally over a month ago that I was moving on from the World Bank. I wanted to write to you directly to give you my new coordinates, to briefly share a thought, and to thank you for your continued collaboration.

As corruption issues around the world seem to be endless, so is the debate about the best way to develop and use corruption indicators.  Whether aggregate or disaggregated; whether actionable or not; whether perception-based or experience-based; whether they should measure inputs or outputs; and whether assessments should be locally-owned or conducted by international institutions are just part of the on-going discussions in open forums and informal chats.

This month we witnessed the publication of two valuable efforts that move towards different directions on corruption measurement: (i) the 2008 Corruption Perception Index launched this week by Transparency International; and (ii) “A Users’ Guide to Measuring Corruption,” published at the beginning of this month by the UNDP Oslo Governance Centre and Global Integrity. 

While Transparency International’s approach relies on composite, cross-country and perception-based indicators, the User’s Guide suggests –among other things– the need for more locally owned assessments that capture the voice and experience of the poor and minority groups, as well as actionable measurements that give a better sense of what needs to be reformed.

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.