Think Tank's Water Bank Rankles

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"UK ministers have been accused of spending British aid money on a public relations campaign to promote water privatisation in Sierra Leone," reports BBC News. Vicky Cann, of the organization World Development Movement, criticized the British Department for International Development (DfID), saying, "In the poorest country of 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 ... but they will also pay for a propaganda campaign to run alongside it to counter public resistance." The eight firms under consideration for the contract include Adam Smith International, "a consultancy arm of the free-market thinktank," and PricewaterhouseCoopers, reports the Guardian. In May, a similar water privatization scheme in Tanzania that DfID paid Adam Smith International £273,000 to promote collapsed "after the contractor, Biwater, was asked to leave by the government."