Strengthening rural water security through professional maintenance: lessons from Cameroon's Mvila Division

ABSTRACT Rural communities across Cameroon's Mvila Division face a persistent challenge: nearly one in three handpumps fails to deliver clean water when needed most. This study provides one of the first comprehensive empirical assessments of professionalized maintenance models in Cameroon, examining water service delivery in this equatorial forest region where 647 water points serve scattered rural populations through community-based management systems. Using the water service sustainability index (WSSI) – a multidimensional framework evaluating technical, financial, institutional, governance, social, and environmental performance – and extensive field interviews with 103 water point committees, we found that current service levels range from poor to medium, with no communities achieving good performance standards. The root cause lies not in technical failures alone, but in the fundamental mismatch between maintenance costs and available community resources. Our findings challenge the effectiveness of community-based management models in resource-constrained settings and point toward a promising solution: pooled resource management through professional service delivery. This approach could unlock the $2 million USD in stranded investments currently sitting idle in broken infrastructure across the division while generating estimated cost savings of $400,000 annually through reduced downtime and avoided health expenditures.