March 21, 2006—More than 10,000 delegates meeting at the Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City March 16 – 22 addressed a variety of questions around the central challenge of delivering clean, reliable, and sustainable water supplies for all—including the impact of corruption in the sector. Donal O’Leary, a Senior Adviser to Transparency International, raised one of the forum’s must vexing questions during a panel discussion focusing on how to overcome corruption in the water sector that attracted more than 200 delegates. “Corruption in the water sector has been around for literally thousands of years,” observed O’Leary at the panel, which was organized by the Water and Sanitation Program at the World Bank in cooperation with other partners, including Transparency International. He asked how we can be any more effective in curbing the impact of corruption than the Romans, who were as preoccupied with the question as we are today? Targeting “pro-poor actions to combat corruption in the water sector” is critical to ensuring water services that should reach the poor do so without the additional cost imposed by bid-rigging or bribes, he said. Presenters on the corruption panel offered evidence that the fight against corruption in the water sector may be most effective at the community level – whether that community is a village in the Philippines or a group of pipe manufacturers in Colombia. Jorge Enrique Angel Gomez, President of Associan Colombiana de Ingenieria Sanitaria y Ambiental (ACODAL), told of the frustration he and his fellow manufacturers in Cali felt at the corruption rampant in their sector. In response, they formed their own anti-corruption association, bound by a code of conduct that includes penalties for transgressors. Membership in the association has swelled from an initial 11 companies to more than 150, he said. “When speaking of corruption, we seem to only talk about the public sector side of the equation, and not the private sector side,” Angel Gomez said. But companies incur higher transaction costs as a result of corruption—costs that ultimately are paid by the people. Gomez pointed to a local survey that showed two-thirds of entrepreneurs encountered corruption and that corruption cost an average of 12 percent of the value of the contract they were working on. In the Philippines, the fight against local corruption in water management sparked wider interest and participation in “people’s movements,” according to Arnold Padilla, a representative of the Water for the People Network. These movements face enormous challenges in uncovering information about suspected corruption in local water projects. But their growth of these movements – Padilla estimated there are at least 100 across the Philippines ranging from rural women’s groups to urban poor organizations – provides hope that this vigilance will curb corrupt practices, he said. At the global level, the Stockholm International Water Institute and the World Bank support the Water Integrity Network, which aims to help the water sector come to grips with corruption. The Water Integrity Network initially will provide information and anti-corruption tool kits for governments, companies, regulators, and civil society organizations. It ultimately aims to establish a fund for “start-up activities” in countries trying to curb corruption in the water sector, O’Leary said. Ede Ijjasz, Global Program Manager in the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program, told the audience the Water Integrity Network is one way the international community can address one of the most troubling aspects of corruption—the fact that so little is really known about it or its impact. Ijjasz and O’Leary said the Water Integrity Network expects to have a work plan finalized by June, when the World Bank will sponsor a workshop on corruption in the water sector in Kampala, with a financing strategy to follow by August. |
RSS