Power, Water and Money: Determining Water Prices in Community Water Supplies, in between cost recovery and pro-poor exclusion

Our paper will try to examine the various forms of power that are remarkable within the water network and how these, in turn are at the bases of uneven social power relations including mechanisms of access to water and exclusion from access to water. We observed that all social groups with sufficient social, political, economic or cultural power will never die of thirst. Cost recovery objectives are the most prevalent rate setting considerations and they are generally weighted the most essential. Other objectives are also important. Affordability for low and fixed income customers if not taken into consideration, can produce simultaneously regimes of access to the rich and exclusion of the poor. Evidence from three communities (Kumbo, Bali and Bafou) in the Western Highlands of Cameroon illustrates this general issue.