A Sourcebook - UN-Water

1 INTRODUCTION
The city is parched. In the slums and squatter settlements, women schedule their lives around
the two hours a day that water trickles from the low taps near their one-room dwellings. Others
less fortunate buy water from men with tanks on handcarts. The men fill their tanks at a broken
main a mile away. No matter where the water comes from, all is contaminated by the sewage
that percolates through the ground into the broken water pipes. The septic tanks of the middle
classes contaminate the groundwater, while in the squatter settlements on the edge of town,
a private place to defecate is almost impossible to find. Flies swarm the exposed faeces, then
land on food in the makeshift kitchens of the shacks nearby.
In the better parts of town, residents have constructed elaborate systems of underground tanks
to store water, overhead tanks for pressure, suction pumps to draw the scarce water from the
utility’s pipes, boreholes, tankers, and second, illegal connections in the struggle to get enough
water. Five star hotels have water trucked in. The tanker drivers charge a hefty price for their
valuable product, yet fill their tankers from the utility’s systems for free. The Government has
borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from the World Bank and others over the years, which
it lent to the utility to build massive treatment works and transmission lines to bring water to the
thirsty city. The utility never serviced any of these loans, so now they burden the taxpayers of
the country. Still the city thirsts.
Why? Could it be because the utility staff, paid a pittance and ill equipped for their formal job,
supplement their income by providing water for free through illegal connections, fix meters,
and omit billing data? Is it because the city councilors take a 10 percent cut of all the construction
contracts awarded, and the contractors make their money back by using shoddy
materials and workmanship that leaks and decays quickly? Perhaps the men who own the
tanker fleets finance the campaigns of leading politicians, who quietly sabotage attempts to
make the utility work properly, since this would take away the tanker drivers’ business?
Water and sanitation providers fail to serve citizens for many reasons. The ultimate cause is poor governance
at the utility, sector, and government levels. Corruption is among the serious symptoms of poor
governance—corrosive in its effects, causing more harm in waste and bad decisions than even the
money that changes hands as bribes and kickbacks would suggest. This Sourcebook aims to help sector
practitioners to:
• Assess the extent and risk of corruption in sectors in which they work
• Improve governance in ways that will reduce corruption.
1.1 What’s in the Sourcebook
This Sourcebook is in four parts:
• Section 2 is about understanding corruption. What is it, what sustains it, how does it relate to
governance, and how might it be reduced?
• Part I is about assessing the risks, extent, and locales of corruption in a particular country
• Part II turns to ways to reduce corruption by improving governance
Part III is about
• monitoring and evaluating measures implemented to improve governance, to
allow learning from experience.
1