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THE BIGGER PICTURE
Across the three countries, the ambition for universal water and sanitation is real and national. What usually went missing was a way for a specific place to turn a country's targets into something it could deliver and pay for. Without it, investment is scattered through disconnected projects that rarely add up to a service that lasts. A plan that a local authority owns changes the terms. It tells a finance ministry, a regional directorate and an international partner the same thing: what the area needs, in what order, and who is accountable.
HOW WE WORKED
Riva’s part was deliberately in the background. We brought the methods – reading where services stood, costing them, phasing the work to 2030 – and the resources for the process that a commune couldn’t have financed alone. We refined it in Banfora, then carried it across communes, regions and borders. Each time, the same approach applied: the plan belonged to the authority that would answer for it, it had to be argued through and voted on, or it changed nothing.
THE HUMAN STORY
Banfora worked because Aboubacar Héma, then mayor, treated the plan as a mandate rather than a document. He knew exactly what it would cost – 17 billion CFA francs by 2030, what he called the largest investment programme in the commune's history. Rather than wait for the money, he set out to raise it. He put municipal budget behind a new water and sanitation directorate inside the town hall, so Banfora had its own people to run the plan. He carried it to every relevant ministry and to the partners working in Burkina at the time, asking each to line up behind the town’s priorities. What Héma proved is what ninety-six other mayors and regional directors chose to do next.