Corruption is denying millions of poor people in Africa access to safe and clean drinking water, experts say.

They say it happens when government officials collude among themselves for selfish gains, unscrupulous water vendors and large farm owners divert water supply lines for their benefit, funds meant for the sector are misappropriated and officials fail to implement laws to protect water sources from encroachment and pollution.

“Wealthy or politically connected people for example, use their position to unduly influence the location of a water source at the cost of the poor,” said Maria Jacobson, programme officer at the UN Development Programme’s Water Governance Facility (WGF), at the Stockholm International Water Institute. “Poor people also have few, if any, means to enter alternative markets when corrupt public systems fail to deliver.”

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According to a 2008 report by the global corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI), more than a billion people on the continent lack access to safe drinking water and 2.8 billion others to sanitation services due to corruption.

TI says corruption also tends to, “raise the price of connecting a household to a water network by as much as 30 per cent,” which leads to inflation of the “overall costs for achieving the Millennium Development Goals on water and sanitation by more than $48 billion.”

In Kenya for example, poor people in the capital Nairobi pay 10 times more for water than their wealthier counterparts, according to TI.

“Because the revenue collected from the water sector is not ring-fenced, it is not ploughed back into improving services. It is common to see leaking and broken pipes in many parts of urban and rural regions of Africa countries,” Barrack Luseno, a Kenyan water sector analyst said.

In Tanzania, a 2012 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Water Alternatives revealed that a large-scale agricultural and livestock farming project — on a 14 hectare plot of land in the Iringa area illegally leased out by the government to a private company led to contamination of nearby water sources serving some 45,000 people.

The study, conducted by the Italian NGO ACRA (Cooperazione Rurale in Africa e America Latina), said fertilisers, pesticides and animal waste from the farm washed downstream to the water points.

“While there are mechanisms in Tanzanian law to limit potentially polluting activities, establish protected zones around water sources and empower water-user organisations to exercise control over activities that damage the quality of water, in practice, in the Iringa region, these were not effective as many procedures were not followed,” the authors said.

So would privatisation reform Africa’s water sector? Opinion is divided on the matter because it has produced different results in different countries.

In a 2012 report, Water Aid an international NGO recommended that governments invest more in the water sector and put measures in place to fight the runaway graft.

In Kenya, officials abandoned plans to open up Nairobi’s water supply to private companies, fearing it would inflate water prices.

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In Uganda, water sector reforms included increased funding from government and better management of the National Water and Sewerage Corporation — a privately managed but publicly owned water company responsible for the 15 largest towns in the country.

According to Water Aid, in just five years of the reforms, it had transformed from being a highly inefficient, underperforming and loss-making body to a healthy and financially sustainable public corporation. Service coverage grew from 48 to 74 per cent between 1998 and 2010. Household connections also rose from 53,000 to 246,259.

Still, corruption has been a challenge.

“In a study of corruption in Uganda’s water sector, private contractors estimated the average bribe related to a contract award to be 10 per cent [of the total cost]. The same study showed that 46 per cent of all urban water consumers had paid extra money for connections,” said Ms Jacobson of WGF.

Ending corruption in the sector, experts like WGF’s Jacobson say, would require diagnosing the effectiveness of anticorruption interventions, creating legal and financial reforms, and building public sector capacity.

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IRIN