IRC Community Water Supply Management: Batcham: Stimulating community initiative

Stories from the Field

Batcham: Stimulating community initiative

Batcham is located in the provincial capital of the West Province of Cameroon. In a ten-minute drive from Bafoussam, on the road to Bamenda, you will find a junction branching off to Dschang which also leads to Batcham. On this road you cannot miss a big junction with a market and many bicycles and motorcycles waiting to pick up people going to Batcham. Take a right and a dirt road will lead you to Batcham. You must fasten your seat belt and hold on tight otherwise you will hit your head against the roof of the vehicle as it rides over the the potholes.

After crossing a small bridge you will be in Batcham but it will be another 25 - 30 minutes before you reach the Catholic Mission Clinic. You may not easily find somebody to help you out if your are English speaking. Almost everybody in the southern part of Cameroon speaks Pigeon English, which is English mixed with the local language.

Carrying out participatory action research activities in Batcham was really difficult because of its size. If you are used to making a village walk through the entire village in a day, forget about it here in Batcham. This is a village with about 32 quarters and each quarter is almost a small village.

Each of the quarters has a quarter head which represents the chief. These quarter heads report to the chief, who is in the same quarter as the clinic. He is a really big chief with a large compound on the way to the clinic. It has many houses with roofs in the form of cone. Only the chief and quarter heads are allowed to roof their houses in this form. We were told that each of the many houses around belongs to a wife. These leaders and notables form the traditional council, which meets only in the chief's palace. The chief is rarely seen in public. In fact, during our four years of working in Batcham we have seen the chief only once. It was really a special occasion when he took part in a PAR activity during the ranking of potential solutions proposed by the villagers. We even had to create his own group made up of his entourage. Ordinary villagers would not feel comfortable working with him.

Water resources

Batcham is a community with handpumps installed by Sister Lola, a Spanish nun managing the clinic in the village. She was motivated to initiate this project because of the high incidence of water-related and water-borne diseases in the village. However, the handpumps were breaking down and the villagers could not do anything. The PAR team arrived when the sister was giving up because she could not continue to repair the pump without the participation of the people. She supported the project inmensely by releasing Mr. Job, who is one of her major staff, to be part of the PAR project. Through him everything in the village was done.

After the handpumps had been installed, the government constructed a pumping system in the village during the Water Decade, through a company from Denmark called Scanwater. This did not even last for a year because of the methodology used. Not one villager knows a thing about it. The choice of technology was so complicated that even if the villagers were trained to manage it, they would still have had problems and the system would not be sustainable.

The geographical location of Batcham makes it very difficult to find a natural surface water source. This limitation makes the village dependent on groundwater. At the moment, the village is interested in a gravity system as they have seen in other villages, but this dream may still take a long time to come true. However, the train is now on the move as they have contacted the Department of CD to make a feasibility study. We hope God hears their prayers and a source is found to bring in water by gravity.

Due to the non-participatory methods used, the two efforts to provide potable water here failed. This was never known to the people until the PAR came. Today their eyes are opened and they have an idea of what should have been done. Because of the methods used previously, no structure was created to manage the systems, and the people have never had any management experience.

Opening people's eyes

When the PAR team arrived in Batcham, the discussions had been mainly with the staff of the clinic, in particular with Rev. Sister Lola and Mr. Job. The Sister was feeling very disappointed with the community because they could not take over the maintenance of the handpumps installed in various quarters. She said that the people of the village lacked community spirit. They could not work together to realize development projects that would improve their health. While she acknowledged their hard working nature, she thought that this was only for their individual interest and not for community interest. She further said that they are very rich people but would not want to spend their money to improve their living standards. Such remarks were not surprising to us because Cameroonians believe that the people of this region, called Bamilikes, hardly spend their money. It is said that for them, having huge amounts in ‘Njangis’ or bank accounts is more important than what they eat.

The clinic had been organizing training meetings to educate the people, particularly the women, on hygiene practices during clinic days, but very little has changed in the village. She was therefore very interested in seeing the difference PAR could make in such a difficult community. This was a challenge for the team as well. She promised to give all the support needed and immediately assigned Mr. Job to be our contact person, who later became part of the local research group (LRG) with another lady from the community.

These two had their full initiation into the PAR project when they attended a workshop organized in Bamenda. During the workshop, there was a visit to Bamesing, a village with a gravity water supply system that functions very well and is managed only by the community members. It thrilled them to find villagers handling such tasks. Mr. Job will never forget this visit, and he always reminded us during the diagnosis phase that their dream is to have a system like that at Bamesing.

Working with the community Community taking the lead

In our usual way of finding out what took place when we were not there, we asked the people what they had been doing in the period of our absence. Mr. Job read a report of meetings held at the clinic and in various quarters. He went ahead and told us that this resulted in the establishment of committees created at central and at quarter level, in those quarters which have handpumps. The quarter committees are supposed to take care of the maintenance of their handpumps, and the central committee has to coordinate and supervise the quarter activities. This is absolutely necessary for a village as large as Batcham.

How was this done? We asked, and Job narrated how he discussed with the sister the need for such organizations as concluded during the solution analyses. The sister agreed with him, since the PAR team always gave feedback to her after sessions in the village. It was now easy for her to release him for a week. During this week, using his motorcycle and fueling it himself, he went around the village discussing with the quarter heads and inviting them for a meeting at the clinic. The meeting was well attended and he made an overview of the process that had been going on with the support of those who were attending the PAR process. They all appreciated his explanation, and from there discussions went on about how to organize themselves. That was when the issue of quarter and central committees came up.

From previous experiences they knew that their people were difficult. Therefore they decided that the initial thing to do would be to carry out sensitization campaigns before forming the committees. This was done through announcements in the church, on market days, and through meetings in each quarter that were held with a health support team from the clinic. People attended these meetings and the message spreaded fast. From then they made appointments with each quarter to elect members for their committees. This was done and all committees were created.

As a result of this eye opening experience, the people went ahead and carried out physical maintenance on the handpumps and wells that had been abandoned for years. Whenever possible pumps were repaired, and those that had gone beyond repair were simply replaced with a rope and bucket system. Initially, the rope was pulled with the hands directly; later they developed a pulley system that eased the water lifting. The pulley was locally made and works very well with very little energy. Children could now lift water, which was not the case earlier, because for those wells the handpumps had been difficult to operate.

PAR as a springboard

In every community initiative, there are always people who influence others. Batcham is not an exception. The first people to get involved when the PAR first arrived have become the cornerstones of the whole process. We are talking about people like Mr. Job and Sister Lola.

In reality, what communities do in most projects is initiated by the elite, who, by virtue of their knowledge and outside experiences, take the lead. Government organizations and NGOs are expected to provide the activation energy, but they are limited by the approach used. From the four years of experience with PAR, this appears to be an approach that will do the trick. Here in Batcham, which initially seemed not to be worth working with, people are now taking unexpected initiatives.

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