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

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.

Sanjay Pradhan, Vice President of The World Bank Institute and Huguette Labelle, Chairperson of Transparency International engaged the audience with their insights on the progress made to this point in the fight against corruption and the (still long) way to go to ensure quality water service delivery around the world.

Authored by myself as Senior Public Sector Specialist at the World Bank Institute, Donal O’Leary, Senior Advisor focusing on water and sanitation issues at Transparency International, Per Ljung, Chairman and CEO of PM Global Infrastructure and John Butterworth, Senior Program Officer at the International Water and Sanitation Centre, the book presents tools and strategies that can be used to curb corruption in the WSS sector.

Some of these tools have been effectively used in countries such as Mexico and Colombia (Integrity Pacts), India (Citizen Report Cards), Panama (E-procurement) and Kenya (Pro-poor and transparent site selection for water points).  By sharing good practice and experiences from around the world the authors sought to inspire others to take action.

The launch brought together three of the authors and over 100 guests and expert practitioners from diverse public and private sector organizations, triggering a lively debate on key issues to improve governance in the sector such as the importance of integrity, leadership and political will to bring about reforms and the need to work in multi-stakeholder coalitions to come up with sound policies that take into account all factors in the equation.

Our hope is that this book can serve as a practical guide for governments; utility regulators, managers, and staff; civil society organizations; contractors; and citizens in their quest for a model of service provision that responds to the pressing needs of people in the developing world.

You can hear audio of the event here.  The book is available at the World Bank’s InfoShop bookstore and will be available in Amazon soon.