Rehabilitation of slow sand filters and new treatment plant designs in rural Cameroon

Helvetas, in cooperation with its local partners, has substantially changed the rural water supply situation in the North West and South West Province of Cameroon. However, a number of water supplies suffer from increasing deterioration of their raw water quality resulting from extensive deforestation and careless farming in the catchment area. Effective operation of the existing treatment plants is thus very difficult. A number of treatment plants have been rehabilitated during the past 10 months. In Cameroon, Helvetas has transformed useless sedimentation tanks into efficient roughing filters and has also constructed new prefilter types. The operational experience with the rehabilitated schemes is impressive and should be used to rehabilitate the remaining treatment plants whose construction have already required considerable investments.