• Public-Private partnerships

Public-Private partnerships

This paper focuses on corruption in Africa’s water and sanitation sector (WSS). It describes through a framework of corrupt interactions among public, private, and consumer/civil society actors, the types of corruption that occurs in the various stages of sector policy making, planning and budgeting, financing, delivery, and implementation.

It argues that corruption is neither singular nor homogenous in any one setting, and that understanding the network of corrupt activity and identifying the areas of concentration of corruption within this larger framework are critical to effective policy making and strategy development.

The paper first gives an overview of the water sector in Africa, looking specifically at access to water supply, perceptions of corruption in the sector, and reforms. It then describes the plural nature of corruption in the sector, setting out in a structured framework the network of corrupt practices prevalent in the sector. This framework categorizes the many types of WSS corruption into a typology of public-to-public, public-to-private, and public-to-consumer interactions, and considers these interactions at each stage of the WSS value chain.

The paper concludes with a discussion of key concerns the WSS sector will need to address as it moves forward with the anti-corruption agenda. These include:

• understanding of the degree of corruption in water supply and sanitation is limited, and no accurate measure has been made of the relative levels of WSS sector corruption between countries in the region. Data are urgently needed to support proposed actions
• a key to effective sector anticorruption activity lies in an understanding of the primary interaction space in which corruption takes place – in particular, how far corrupt water interactions extend beyond water institutions and stakeholders
• efforts to promote accountability in government are undermined if pressures on staff come from outside government. So, it is vital to develop anticorruption mechanisms that tackle the actions of bribers soliciting and paying bribes in water sector transactions
• acknowledging that corruption is a problem, developing a broader platform of advocates, building awareness, and creating a safe space fro dialogue will all be critical to effective sector action

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