Every morning before dawn, 38-year-old Ngale Precillia Mofa wakes her three children and leads them down the steep slope of Buea Mountain to a neighbour’s compound, where a small borehole was sunk two years ago at enormous personal cost. She carries two 25-litre jerrycans. The children carry one each. The round trip takes nearly an hour, over uneven ground, in darkness. By the time the family has enough water for cooking, bathing and drinking to last the day, the sun is already climbing above Mount Cameroon’s volcanic ridgeline.
“I am exhausted before the day begins,” says Ngale, seated in her small sitting room on Clerk’s Quarters Road in Buea. “We used to have water from the pipe. Now the pipe gives nothing, sometimes for three weeks at a time. We cannot live like this.”
Her story is not exceptional. Across Buea, a town of roughly 300,000 people perched on the slopes of Africa’s highest active volcano in Cameroon’s
South West Region, the failure of the piped water supply has become a defining feature of daily life. From the university campus to the commercial district, from the highland neighbourhoods of Great Soppo to the lower slopes of Mile 16, residents speak of a water crisis that is deepening year by year.
The Cameroon Water Utility company, known as CamWater, operates the piped water infrastructure across the country’s urban centres. In Buea, the system draws from natural springs and surface water sources on the flanks of Mount Cameroon, sources that scientists and engineers say are shrinking.
Speaking at a press briefing in Yaoundé on 14 April 2026, the Minister of Water Resources and Energy, Gaston Elondu Essomba, acknowledged the crisis directly. “The volumes of water that we are able to collect for treatment and distribution have declined significantly over the past several years,” the minister said. “This is not simply a question of infrastructure. This is a consequence of climate change. The rainfall patterns that fed our sources have shifted. The streams that supply our intake points are lower. We are working to adapt, but the resource itself is diminishing.”
The minister’s admission was striking in its candour but offered limited comfort to the hundreds of thousands of Cameroonians facing a rationed water supply or none at all. CamWater has instituted a rationing system in Buea and several other major towns, supplying water to different neighbourhoods on a rotating schedule that residents say is irregular and unpredictable. Some areas, particularly on the upper slopes of the mountain, receive piped water as infrequently as once every two to three weeks.
The minister’s attribution of the water crisis to climate change is supported by a growing body of scientific evidence. A 2024 report by the Centre for Environment and Development (CED) in Yaoundé documented a measurable decline in average rainfall across the South West Region over the past two decades, alongside shifts in seasonal precipitation patterns that have disrupted the timing and volume of water entering rivers and springs.
Mount Cameroon, the dominant geological feature of the region, once functioned as a vast natural water tower, its upper elevations capturing moisture from Atlantic weather systems and releasing it slowly into the river systems below. Researchers at the University of Buea’s Department of Environmental Science say that changes in cloud forest moisture dynamics, linked to rising temperatures and altered wind patterns, have reduced the mountain’s capacity to capture and retain atmospheric water.
“The mountain is drying,” says Dr Favour Nkongho, a hydrologist at the University of Buea, in an interview on 28 May 2026. “The sources that CamWater relies on are fed by springs that depend on consistent rainfall infiltration and slow groundwater recharge. When the rains come later, or in shorter, more intense bursts, less water infiltrates and more runs off. The springs are producing less water. That is the simple reality.”
Faced with chronic water insecurity, Buea’s residents have been forced into coping strategies that are expensive, unreliable and not without risk. Rainwater harvesting — collecting water from rooftops into tanks and barrels during the rainy season- has become commonplace in many households. Families who can afford it have invested in large plastic storage tanks that they fill when it rains and ration throughout the dry months.
But the strategy has a fundamental vulnerability: the rains themselves are becoming less predictable. “Last dry season was worse than any I can remember,” says Emmanuel Mbah, a 52-year-old secondary school teacher in Molyko. “We collected water in March when it rained. By August, our tanks were empty. We had to buy water from vendors at prices we cannot afford.”
Water vending, the sale of water from private tanker trucks, has grown into a significant informal industry in Buea and other water-stressed towns. But the prices are beyond the reach of many families. A 1,000-litre delivery to a household in Buea costs between 3,000 and 5,000 Central African francs (CFA), a significant sum in a region where many families survive on less than 75,000 CFA per month.
The drilling of private boreholes represents another expensive solution that is reshaping the social geography of water access. Sinking a borehole in Buea costs between 800,000 and 1.5 million CFA, depending on depth and geological conditions, a sum utterly beyond the reach of the vast majority of households. Those fortunate enough to have a borehole often become informal suppliers to their neighbours, creating micro-economies of water access built on the failure of public infrastructure.
“My neighbour spent everything he had saved for years to sink a borehole,” says Ngale Precillia Mofa, back on Clerk’s Quarter. “He is not rich. But now our whole street comes to him. He does not charge us, but he should. He spent his savings so that we could have water. This is not right. This is a government responsibility.”
Public health workers in Buea say the water crisis is creating conditions for preventable disease. When piped water is unavailable, families often resort to unprotected streams, stagnant pools or insufficiently treated rainwater. Cases of waterborne illness, diarrhoea, typhoid and intestinal parasites spike during periods of prolonged water scarcity, according to staff at the regional hospital in Buea.
Children are disproportionately affected. A 2025 health survey conducted by the Regional Delegation of Public Health for the South West Region found that acute diarrhoeal disease remained the leading cause of under-five hospitalisation in the region, with a strong correlation between reported water access problems and disease incidence.
By Yanick Fonki Ndeley l CCMN l South West Chapter
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