By BRIGID O'HARA-FORSTER.

n 1991 Peter Eigen, the World Bank's resident director for East Africa, seemed an unlikely candidate to become a latter-day Don Quixote fighting against waste and corruption. An archetypal member of the fraternity of global financiers who dispense international largesse, Eigen had lived by the credo that the bank should tend only to its own projects. To attack abuse in the private sector would amount to meddling in a host country's affairs. But he saw from his Kenyan post that projects rejected by the bank because they were uneconomic and had harmful side-effects were later picked up by foreign companies. The bank had, for example, intended to overcome a water shortage in the coastal city of Mombasa with a simple $40 million pipeline-rehabilitation project. But foreign firms lobbied the Nairobi goverment for a more expensive new pipeline to carry water across 200 km to the city. Neither project has yet been implemented and Mombasa continues to suffer from a lack of water.

Such episodes, plus graphic tales from his physician wife, Jutta, about the desperate lives of the people she worked with, convinced Eigen that "Kenya's progress was halted by corruption and I wanted to do something about it." According to long-time colleague Mike Stevens, the World Bank's corruption guru, "Peter was ahead of his time." Unable to persuade the Bank to take a more activist stance, Eigen took early retirement, determined to launch his own war on corruption.

Eigen created Transparency International in 1993 after concluding that the tool of publicity wielded so successfully by Amnesty International to combat human rights abuses could also be utilized by an organization attacking the destructive social and economic effects of corruption. Eigen at first worked out of his Berlin home with only one aide. Today TI is still the only private non-profit organization fighting corruption globally, but it now employs 16 full-time staffers at its headquarters and has established national chapters in some 60 countries. The group's $2 million annual budget comes from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Soros Foundation, the British Overseas Development Agency, the Ford Foundation, the European Union and a variety of private companies.

TI first made waves with publication of its Corruption Perception Index in 1995. According to Daniel Kaufman, the World Bank's lead economist: "Transparency International has been instrumental in putting corruption on the world's agenda." The group has been involved in many of the international initiatives now underway to criminalize the payment of bribes and abolish their tax deductibility, including the O.E.C.D. Convention. TI has also launched preventive measures through its "islands of integrity" scheme, under which officials offering a public contract and those bidding for it both pledge to abstain from bribery and extortion and to accept punishment if that pledge is not honored. That plan has now been adopted by eight countries. In Panama, for example, the concept was used to prevent bribery when the Panama telecommunications company was privatized. As the venture that once seemed so quixotic begins to bear fruit, Eigen believes he made the right choice back in Kenya: "It's satisfying to see that things have started moving and that we have contributed to it."

--With Reporting by Clive Mutiso /Nairobi and Alexandra Stiglmayer /Berlin