UNITED NATIONS, New York—From bribes of a few dollars to kickbacks and embezzlement running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, corruption relating to water is undermining the health and well-being of billions of people around the world.

Dr. Huguette Labelle, Chairwoman of Transparency International.

That’s the conclusion of a book-length study by Transparency International, an organization with headquarters in Berlin that has been tracking corruption in business and government for years.

In the new study, “The Global Corruption Report 2008: Corruption in the Water Sector,” Transparency International concentrated for the first time on water. The theme of its global report last year was corruption in the judiciary.

Problems with water, such as shortages and pollution, are often attributed to a changing environment or to mistakes, carelessness and deliberate abuse by manufacturers, governments and ordinary people.

But in its worldwide study, made public at United Nations Headquarters in June, Transparency International cited greed as a viral core running through virtually every problem related to water.

The study was a benchmark. Transparency International said it was the most comprehensive examination to date of corruption relating to water.

“For the first time we are looking at the problem in an integrated way,” said Huguette Labelle, the chairwoman of Transparency International.

As part of the presentation of the study, Dr. Labelle joined several other experts in a panel discussion moderated by Joseph B. Treaster, the Knight Chair for Cross Cultural Communication at the University of Miami. Mr. Treaster, a former foreign correspondent and domestic reporter for The New York Times, moderated a similar panel a day later in Washington at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Dr. Labelle, who is also the chancellor of the University of Ottawa, told the United Nations audience that Transparency International found corruption in projects involving sanitation, irrigation and hydro electricity, among others.

Sometimes, she said, the corruption involved bid-rigging. Sometimes it was bribery or embezzlement or plain theft of equipment and material. Often corruption becomes a drag on national development, she said.

Corruption could be reduced by strengthening water regulation, improving training of inspectors, insisting upon integrity in inspections and by providing better public access to financial records on water projects, Dr. Labelle said.

Adopting some of these guidelines, the United Nations Development Program has been setting up pioneering anti-corruption programs in developing countries, according to Andrew Hudson, the United Nations Development Program’s Water Governance team leader.

In the study, Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan Nobel Prize winner for work on the environment, wrote that those involved in corruption “break the rules that preserve habitats and ecosystems.” They “plunder and pollute” water sources that the entire world depends upon and “steal the money that is meant to get water to the poor.”

One panelist, Dr. Håkan Tropp, a director of the Stockholm International Water Institute and a leader of the Water Integrity Network, an ally of Transparency International, said it would be difficult—if not impossible—for poor countries to improve their standards of living without addressing corruption relating to water.

The study included detailed reports from 34 countries and the Palestinian Authority and it described a far-reaching global problem. 

“More than one billion people around the world do not have guaranteed access to water and more than 2.6 billion live without basic sanitation,” the study said.  “Failure to tackle corruption in the water sector exacerbates these dire conditions and raises social and economic costs.”

SEATTLE – The Duwamish River is Seattle’s industrial backbone, a source of much of the city’s history, and one of the country’s most contaminated chemical waste sites.  Gary Thomsen, a high school history teacher who has devoted much of his career to studying the history of the river, says the now-polluted river valley once boasted “the most fertile soil in the world, second only to the Amazon River.”

But that did not impress the investors and developers who have transformed the landscape of Seattle over the decades. That rich farmland, Mr. Thomsen said, has “been paved over and turned into parking lots and strip malls.”

Decades of heavy manufacturing along the 12-mile-long river, have polluted it and the surrounding underground water with pesticides, heavy metals such as mercury and lead, and chemical solvents. The Duwamish originates as the Green River in the snowy western Cascades and flows north into Seattle’s Elliot Bay.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been working to clean up the river for years. In 2001 it took the dramatic step of designating the Duwamish as a Superfund site, highlighting the river as one of the roughly 1,300 most blighted and polluted locations in the country and negotiating agreements with suspected polluters to pay for restoration. . The federal agency cited the Boeing Company, the City of Seattle, the Port of Seattle and King County as “potentially liable parties.” Without conceding responsibility for the damage to the river, the four agreed to work together with the EPA on the cleanup.  Boeing and the others had tried unsuccessfully to head off the stigma of Superfund designation and the formal assignment of financial liability.

Progress has been painfully slow. One attempt at removing contaminated sediment merely succeeded in further spreading hazardous material. Environmentals say foul substances continue to flow into the river. Scores of storm drains empty into the Duwamish. . Much of the pollution is small-scale, but persistent. In one widely reported instance in May, however, a tractor trailer crashed on a nearby highway and 200 gallons of diesel fuel poured into the Duwamish through a storm drain. By 2007, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that $70 million had been spent on the river project.  It foresaw expenditures of as much as $200 million more, adding that environmentalists were saying that, even then, the river would probably remain hazardous.

These days, Seattle’s famous silvery salmon still run in the Duwamish. But warning signs caution, as they have for years, against eating them more than once a month.  Other kinds of fish and crabs, State Health Department officials say, are never safe to eat.

At one spot along the river, officials have found concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, greater than 900 times the generally accepted safe level.  The EPA says PCBs probably cause cancer. High levels of carcinogenic chemicals also have been found in some houses along the river in one of the poorest areas of Seattle.

James Rasmussen, a leader of the Duwamish Native American tribe and a longtime advocate of a healthy river, worries that those working on the clean up do not have their hearts in the job. 

“I don’t want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and not really do something,” he said. “If we are going to really do something, then we need to do it right the first time, so that it gets cleaned and stays clean.”

Mr. Rasmussen says an inconsistent approach to the cleanup may extend the danger beyond the river’s banks.  A regional supermarket chain, he said, sells contaminated salmon from the river. They sell “the Green River wild salmon that comes out of this river all over a three state area,” Mr. Rasmussen said, referring to Washington, Oregon and Idaho. “And those fish have problems.”

Funding for this report provided by the KUOW Program Venture Fund, including Puget Sound Energy and Paul and Laurie Ahern.  Listen to the five-part radio series Life on the Duwamish.

NAIROBI, Kenya--As day breaks over the rusty tin roofs and makeshift homes of the sprawling Kibera slum in Nairobi, the water sellers are already at their water tanks, waiting for their first customers.

Selling water in one of the world’s largest slums is a good business. On most days the vendors charge 5 cents for five gallons, 100 times the cost of piped water provided by the city. But the city does not send water to the residents of Kibera--at any price.

Government officials reason that providing water and other municipal services to the roughly 1 million people who have settled illegally on the southwestern edge of this East African capital would tacitly acknowledge the right of the squatters to be on the land.  And, they say, it might encourage more poor people from the countryside to join them.

That leaves the people of Kibera to deal with the water sellers.  They control the taps and decide the price.  The water sellers pay less than a penny a gallon and sometimes, when demand is high, push up the price for filling a 5-gallon plastic jug (the bare minimum daily supply of water for one person) up to 25 cents – a staggering price in a place where most people struggle to survive on less than $1 a day.

Around the world, the United Nations Population Fund says, more than 1 billion people live in informal settlements like Kibera. Given the lack of basic services, water sellers often provide a kind of solution.  But because the water they deliver is overpriced, and often tainted, they create problems as well.

In Nairobi, a small, non-profit organization called Kenya Water for Health Organization is trying to draw customers away from the water sellers by providing a cheaper, cleaner product.

In the Makina neighborhood in Kibera, groups of women organized and funded by Kenya Water buy water from the Nairobi municipal water company and sell it at a modest mark up.  They also teach residents of Kibera basic sanitation techniques.

Kibera’s women routinely spend hours each day standing in lines at the water sellers’ tanks.  Kenya Water has put the women in charge of the new system.

“The women will charge less for water because they know the problems of women,” said Kaltuma Tahir, a 48-year-old mother of six.  She has been a paid community coordinator for Kenya Water for five years, “The other vendors charge more because they are only earning for themselves.”

Some of the commercial water sellers buy water in bulk from the city.  Others break into water mains to steal water from the city.  They bring water to Kibera through cheap plastic pipes that cut across dirt alleyways lined with open sewers flowing with garbage and human waste.  Often raw sewage seeps into broken pipes.  Water that was clean at its source becomes contaminated.

Kenya Water has addressed the problem with a miraculously simple solution. They’ve taught residents to harness the sterilizing power of the sun’s ultra-violet rays. By filling ordinary clear plastic bottles with contaminated water and placing them in direct sunlight for six hours, usually on the corrugated metal roofs of their homes, tainted water becomes safe without expensive technology.

So far Kenya Water has reached only a tiny fraction of Kibera’s million residents.  With no other way to get water, the rest must line up early each day to pay what the water sellers demand.

But the water sellers have their defenders. “Not all of the water vendors are bad,” says Paul Ochieng, an employee of Kenya Water.

Mr. Ochieng distinguishes between the water sellers who buy water in bulk and sell it at a steep mark up and those who steal water from the city."The ones that are bad,” he said, “are those that do illegal connections, that divert water illegally, use cheap unsanitary piping and create shortages.”

John Kyalo, who makes a living as a water seller in Kibera, sees himself as an entrepreneur, making something for himself out of a bad situation.

“I had a little money in the bank and I had to think of something to invest in that might give me some returns,” Mr. Kyalo said.  Sporting a pressed polo shirt and crisp jeans, Mr. Kyalo thinks of himself as providing a service.  Even though he charges 150 times his cost, he said he thinks he is being reasonable. Some sellers, he said, demand far more during shortages.

Mr. Kyalo said he has been trying to get his fellow water sellers to take less profit and stop raising prices, even if desperate people are willing to meet their demands.

“I grew up suffering in the same system,” Mr. Kyalo said. “As a child of a single mother in Kibera, water was always a problem.”

Travel for this reporting project was sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. For related project materials, please visit: Water Wars: Ethiopia and Kenya.  Please visit Women’s eNews for the full story.

Dr. Sachs, one of the architects of the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, which seek to improve the lives of the world’s poorest people, spoke with Mr. Treaster on the Columbia campus during a break in the State of the Planet Conference in late March.

The biennial conference, which Dr. Sachs first convened a decade ago, drew economists, scientists, engineers, lawyers, business executives and students from Europe, Asia, Latin America and the United States.

In an opening address, Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, said it was very clear that “we are headed toward a new global society.

“Yet,” he said, the institutions in the United States “and our mindset are not ready for this new global society. We have a ways to go to catch up with what’s going on around the planet.”

Focusing on the environment, Kofi A. Annan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, told the conference he believed that the debate over climate change was over.

“Now,” he said, “we need agreement on how to tackle it.”

In an effort to combat water related diseases the Lifestaw purifies water while it is being consumed.

The Aquaduct is pedal powered vehicle that transports, filters, and stores water for the developing world. A peristaltic pump attached to the pedal crank draws water from a large tank, through a filter, to a smaller clean tank. The clean tank is removable and closed for contamination-free home storage and use. A clutch engages and disengages the drive belt from the pedal crank, enabling the rider to filter the water while traveling or while stationary. More information here.

By Sarah Stuteville

DILLO, Ethiopia - “Just breathe,” I tell myself as I slowly shuffle up the dusty gravel path. “One breath with each step.” I have a muddy yellow plastic can strapped to my back. It is filled with water and weighs 50 pounds, close to a third as much as I weigh. It is hard for me to walk, but I am trying to follow the cracked plastic sandals in front of me.

For one day, I am doing what millions of poor women around the world do every day: I am carrying water. Their families need water. And the only way they can get it is to hoist it on to their backs or heads in cans and jugs and buckets. It is a never ending job that in many countries takes up more of the day than anything else the women do.

I’ve joined a group of women from this tiny desert village in southern Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world. The capital, Addis Ababa, a rapidly expanding city where steel and glass skyscrapers rise above acres of tin-roofed shanties, is 400 miles and 15 hours away by Land Cruiser over disintegrating asphalt and hard-packed dirt roads.

One girl in the group, 14 years old and wearing a patched purple dress, has fallen.  Several of us struggle to get her back on her feet. She is pinned down by the heavy can of water on her back.  Our own loads make it hard for us to lift her. The path is on a steep slope and our feet slip on the loose gravel.

Finally we get her to her feet. “Galatoma, galatoma—thank you, thank you,” she says in the Ethiopian language of Oromifa.

This is life for millions of women in poor countries.  They routinely walk four or five miles a day to get water. They go out light, with empty containers. But heading home, they are often hauling more than 40 pounds of water.

The women walk because they have no choice. They must have water. It will not come to them. The government will not bring it to them. They must walk for it.

Dillo, a raw, sun baked town with a few plain cement government buildings and clusters of one-room huts flanking a dirt main street, is just one of the many places in Ethiopia where simply getting a modest supply of water is a lot of work. According to the African Development Fund, 76 percent of Ethiopia’s 77 million people lack clean and easily accessible water.  Few places in the world are in worse shape.

The morning I joined the trek for water, dozens of women and children had set out from the center of town with empty jugs and cans.  At the edge of a crater overlooking Dillo’s only source of water, we stopped to catch our breath.  In the distance, we saw two small green pools of water framed by gleaming white salt flats.

Starting down the steep hillside, the only sounds were the dry crunching of our footsteps and the occasional hollow thump as another woman staggered and her plastic can banged into the wall of the narrow rock passage.

The view up from the foot of the crater was as terrifying as the view from above was stunning.  Orange light broke over the rim of the cliff.  An ominous heat collected around us and the top seemed impossibly far away.

Almost a decade of drought has left the region around Dillo desperate. The rains stalled again this year. Schools closed for lack of water. Government officials in the area talk about piping in water from a well 60 miles away.  But work on the project has yet to start.

Some of the women in Dillo say they think it will never happen. Fadi Jilo an elegant 30-year-old mother of three has been trekking for water here for 15 years.  “We have applied so many times for help, for them to provide us with a water system,” she said. “But nobody responds to us.” Sweat dripped from her forehead.  “They have promised us so many times,” she said, “ but they haven’t done anything.”

--Travel for this reporting project was sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.  For related project materials, please visit: Water Wars: Ethiopia and Kenya.

On World Water Day, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer launched a series of articles on water scarcity in Ethiopia.  Visit Seattle Post-Intelligencer for the full series.  Visit World Vision Report for the radio story.