Ja, faktisk løber tallet op i hundreder af millioner og det skyldes en farlig cocktail af magtfulde interesser og skrupelløse personer – hver gang må de fattige bøde, enten i form af intet eller forurenet vand eller betale højere priser for det end andre.
NAIROBI, 14 March 2013 (IRIN): Corruption is denying millions of poor people in Africa access to safe and clean drinking water, experts say.
The reasons for this are collusion (sammensværgelse) among government officials, unscrupulous water vendors (sælgere) and large farm owners results in diverted water supply lines, misappropriated funds, and failure to implement laws on protecting water sources from encroachment (trængen sig ind på) and pollution.
“The impact of corruption on the water sector is manifested by lack of sustainable delivery, inequitable (uretfærdig /ulige) investment and targeting of resources, and limited participation of affected communities in developmental processes,” Bethlehem Mengistu, regional advocacy manager at the NGO Water Aid, told IRIN.
In a 2010 report, the UN World Health Organization (WHO), estimated that around 780 million people around the world, including 343 million in Africa, did not have access to an “improved drinking water supply”, meaning a running water network, public drinking fountains, protected wells or springs, or rainwater tanks.
Globally, an estimated 3 million deaths result from water-borne diseases annually, according to WHO.
According to the World Bank, 20 to 40 percent of public finances worldwide meant for the water sector are lost due to corruption and dishonest practices.
Denied water
In Africa, climate change and burgeoning (voksende) populations have caused competition over scarce water resources, at times leading to communal conflicts. Experts say corruption worsen Africa’s water problems.
“More specific examples of how corruption denies poor people access to water include situations where wealthy or politically connected people use their position to unduly influence the location of a water source at the cost of the poor,” Maria Jacobson, told IRIN.
She is programme officer at the UN Development Programme’s Water Governance Facility (WGF), at the Stockholm International Water Institute.
According to Jacobson, the poor “do not have the resources to participate in a corrupt system that relies on bribes (bestikkelse)”, and therefore “lose out in terms of poor water services”.
“Poor people also have few, if any, means to enter alternative markets when corrupt public systems fail to deliver,” she added.
A 2008 report by Transparency International (TI), a global corruption watchdog, estimated that corruption denied more than a billion people access to safe drinking water and kept 2,8 billion from accessing (at få) sanitation services.
Contaminated water in Tanzania
In Tanzania, a 2012 study revealed that a large-scale agricultural and livestock farming project led to contamination (forurening) of nearby water sources serving some 45.000 people.
The project on a 14 hectare plot of land in the Iringa area was leased out by the government to a private company, allegedly without following the legal process.
The study said fertilizers, pesticides and animal waste (animalsk affald) from the farm washed downstream to the water points.
The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Water Alternatives and conducted by the Italian NGO ACRA (Cooperazione Rurale in Africa e America Latina).
“While there are mechanisms within Tanzanian law to limit potentially polluting activities, establish protected zones around water sources, and empower water-user organizations 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.
In developing countries, corruption is estimated to, according to the TI report, “raise the price for connecting a household to a water network by as much as 30 per cent”.
This leads to an inflation of the “overall costs for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (2015 Målene) for water and sanitation, cornerstones for remedying (udbedre) the global water crisis, by more than (a stunning!) 48 billion US dollar.”
In Kenya, for instance, poor people in the capital, Nairobi, pay 10 times more for water than their wealthier counterparts, according to TI.
Incompetence
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http://www.irinnews.org/Report/97642/In-Africa-corruption-dirties-the-water
