Access to drinking water in Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso

In Burkina Faso, if the access to drinking water in urban areas has improved in recent years, with 93% reached in 2017, pressures remain on water resources. The country’s increasingly rapid urbanization is challenging the Government’s ability to meet the social demands of access to water, and increasing the pressures on water resource. In Bobo-Dioulasso, the country’s economic capital, water supply is not continuous, and certain areas suffer from a significant deficit, especially during the dry season. With a population that exceeds one million inhabitants, the challenges of access to water are therefore significant. In this context, the National Office for Water and Sanitation (ONEA), which provides the public drinking water service in centers with more than 10,000 inhabitants, started in 2015, with financial support from the French Development Agency (AFD), a program to strengthen the city’s drinking water production system, called PAPEP, to meet water needs by 2030.

SGI was mandated to carry out a component of a second program called PIRC, following on from PAPEP. The objective is to define an investment program for the strengthening of the city’s distribution network and, thus, optimize the investments made by PAPEP by proposing a better distribution of the resource. Phœnix is responsible for assessing the conditions for the financial viability of these two projects with regards to their costs and the financing structure envisaged, including whether the two projects can support debt financing. This part of the study should therefore allow the AFD to decide on the conditions for on-lending State funding to ONEA.