The Concordat Schedules a September Review of Its Nine-Trillion Water Package

BRUSSELS — The Global Concordat Council has fixed a date this month to reopen the largest single line item it has ever approved: the nine-trillion, decade-long water package agreed at the Nairobi congress in July. The review is routine by charter and pointed by circumstance. Two months after the Sahel corridor's groundbreaking, with the Makran spine in service and taps running from Agadez to Karachi, the delegates return to a question the engineering cannot answer for them — whether the money is reaching the standpipe or the ledger. "We funded relief. We must now verify that relief, and not merely the accounts, is what was delivered," said Secretary-General Ingrid Halvorsen, who has made auditability the theme of her chairmanship. The review will hear from the corridor municipalities now drafting their own water ordinances, from auditors chasing the meters, and from relief bodies who report the water flowing but the tariffs murky. Nobody expects the package to be unwound; it is working, visibly, in the places it reaches. The harder examination is of the places it doesn't, and of the contracts that stand between a public liter and a private toll. Halvorsen's framing was characteristically dry. "A generous decade," she said, "deserves an honest audit."