Six of the eight short-listed companies are British; they include Adam Smith International and PricewaterhouseCoopers; both companies have previously been contracted by DfID to promote privatisation in developing countries. So concerned are WDM about the government’s latest move that they have written to DfID asking a series of specific questions about the contract and querying its legality. They have also signalled their intention to write to the short-listed companies requesting their withdrawal from the bidding process.

WDM policy officer Vicky Cann said:

“Time and again throughout the world water privatisation has failed to deliver clean water to poor people. Now we find out that in the poorest country in the world, which is still recovering from a decade long bitter civil war, DfID is not only going to pay international consultants to advise on how to privatise water in Freetown, but they will also pay for a propaganda campaign to run alongside it to counter public resistance. Is this really the best use of UK aid money - UK tax-payers’ money - that DfID can come up with? As far as we are concerned this is definitely immoral; the legal advice that we have is that it could well be illegal too.”

A further cause for concern is that the Sierra Leonean people seem to have no idea about what is being planned for their water system. The NGOs that WDM spoke to were shocked that pro-privatisation PR work was being planned when the issue had not even been discussed in Sierra Leone.

Lucinda Amara, a Sierra Leonean working for an aid agency in Freetown said:

“We didn’t know about the privatisation planned for the Guma Valley Water Company in Freetown until the World Development Movement told us about it. Water is such an important resource that everyone should be involved in discussing it and weighing up the different options to bring the improvements to the system that Sierra Leone desperately needs. Unfortunately this debate is just not happening in Sierra Leone at the moment.”

DfID clearly recognises that there may be problems associated with privatisation, indeed one of the reasons they cite for needing a PR campaign is that there may be “public resistance to the divestiture of enterprises seen as a ‘public good’, together with fear for the implications of the cost of the service.”

Sierra Leone is the poorest country in the world and the World Health Organisation estimates that only 28% of the population have access to clean water. The state run water company is in crisis and in urgent need of reform. No evidence however could be found that any reform options other than privatisation have been investigated, nor that a basic poverty assessment has taken place.

Based on an assessment of water privatisations around the world, WDM believes that privatisation is a failing solution to the global water crisis, and has highlighted a range of failed water privatisations across the developing world. Earlier this year, for example, a flagship privatisation programme in Tanzania spectacularly collapsed when City Water, a joint venture involving UK water company Biwater, was kicked out of the country on the grounds of poor performance.

The Tanzanian government alleged that City Water failed to improve services or make even half the required investment in two years. DfID had given £273,000 of UK taxpayers’ money, to Adam Smith International to promote privatisation in Tanzania. This money was spent on PR materials including a pop song with the lines “Young plants need rain, businesses need investment. Our old industries are like dry crops and privatisation brings the rain.”

Sierra Leone recently had a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper agreed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; built into this were privatisation commitments which have been conditions of Sierra Leone receiving aid and qualifying for debt relief since 2001. If Sierra Leone continues to implement privatisation, it should qualify for full debt relief in 2006.

DfID have a history of using development funds to pay consultants to promote privatisation. Last year they gave PriceWaterhouseCoopers nearly £50,000 to provide a privatisation adviser to the Sierra Leonean government; money which if invested in pumps and wells could have provided 8,000 people in rural Sierra Leone with access to water.