Emergence of an intermunicipal structure

With a large number of facilities no longer functioning, the rural populations of the nine communes in the Mbam and Inoubou department were experiencing serious difficulties in obtaining supplies of drinking water. In a national context of emerging decentralisation, the nine mayors of the department decided to create an association of mayors to drive forward and support the project to create a joint organising authority. The aim was to benefit from an efficient partnership approach and to establish a relevant scale for exercising powers.

The stakeholders opted for a real legal innovation in Cameroon: the creation of an inter-municipal syndicate whose aim is to provide the population with long-term access to drinking water and basic sanitation.

The first mission was to provide input for the setting up of an intermunicipal organising authority and its operational structuring: to inform elected representatives of the principles and implications of exercising supra-municipal jurisdiction, to define the role and place of the various players, particularly the links between the future syndicate and existing village management structures, by proposing a relationship diagram between the players, to address the issue of transferring existing staff and facilities, and to lay the foundations for organising and managing the future service.

The second mission was to estimate the operating costs of the service and determine the conditions for the financial sustainability of the future syndicate in conjunction with the study of the population’s willingness to pay for water.

It became clear that the timetable for the decentralisation of responsibility would accelerate in 2010 with the meeting of the Conseil National de Décentralisation (National Decentralisation Council), with the aim of transferring responsibility to the municipalities, including responsibility for drinking water.

The financial resources accompanying the decentralisation process and the methods of payment to the public entities exercising water powers have yet to be defined. There are various possible routes to the intercommunal budget: direct payment of funds by the State, payment via the FEICOM, payment via the communes, etc.

It has also been brought to our attention that the salaries of the secretary general and the municipal collector will be paid by the public entity managing the competencies concerned. As part of the implementation of the Geographic Information System (GIS), it seems essential to capitalise on the information gathered during this study in terms of the billing base and to enrich the database as part of the coordination action. Ideally, in the long term, we would like to have an exhaustive knowledge of the billing base, with a view to determining unit prices more precisely, but also to defining and implementing the regulatory procedures of the village management committees.

The partnership between SDEA, ENGEES, ISF, Ircod Alsace and various Cameroonian organisations, including ERA Cameroun, has supported the gradual structuring of a water service that culminated in November 2010 in the creation of the first inter-municipal association in Cameroon: the Syndicat des communes du Mbam et Inoubou (SYCOMI).

The communes of Lékié took their inspiration from this to create their own syndicate (SYNCOLEK), with the support and expertise of SYCOMI and the SDEA (Syndicat départemental des eaux et de l’assainissement Alsace-Moselle), to develop their own public water and sanitation service.