Stamping out corruption can save lives
Stopping practices such as cronyism and embezzlement can save lives in poor countries, a graft watchdog said yesterday as Somalia, Iraq and Myanmar again came bottom in its global corruption rankings.
"In the poorest countries, corruption levels can mean the difference between life and death, when money for hospitals or clean water is in play," Transparency International (TI) said.
"The continuing high levels of corruption and poverty plaguing many of the world's societies amount to an ongoing humanitarian disaster and cannot be tolerated," the non-governmental organisation's head Huguette Labelle said.
Rampant corruption in low-income countries also jeopardises the global fight against poverty and threatens to derail the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the report published in Berlin said.
This "calls for a more focused and coordinated approach by the global donor community to ensure development assistance is designed to strengthen institutions of governance and oversight in recipient countries, and that aid flows themselves are fortified against abuse and graft," TI said.
It estimates that unchecked levels of corruption would add 50 billion dollars -- or nearly half of annual global aid outlays -- to the cost of achieving the MDGs on water and sanitation.
The African Union has estimated that corruption costs the continent 148 billion dollars annually, equal to the gross domestic product of Kenya, Tanzania and Cameroon combined, TI said.
According to TI's latest Corruption Perceptions Index, the countries worst hit by problems such as back-handers and bribery in 2008 remained Somalia, Myanmar and Iraq.
Somalia, the east African nation without a functioning government since 1991, scored just 1.0 point on TI's range of between zero, which is highly corrupt, and 10, which is very clean.
Myanmar, which received international condemnation for its heavy-handed crackdown on protests in September 2007, was on 1.3 points, as was Iraq, five years after a US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. Haiti was on 1.4.
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