Best practices of users' participation in public utility and community management water supply and sanitation service provision in small urban centers in developing countries

In many developing countries a water sector reform is actually undertaken. A lot of countries choose for a decentralization of their national water utilities in order to improve their performance. Most of them are forced or driven to go towards private sector water supply as a reaction to poor service delivery by public services. But there are also enough good examples of good public or community driven water service delivery, from which we want to highlight some cases and especially on how users' participate in the management and service delivery. A key element for good governance of these decentralized agencies is a sound balance of the interests of the local government, the management of the public utilities and the customers. In this process it is important to learn lessons from different experiences with various participation mechanisms at the local level. The importance of sound cooperation between water users and water managers is evident for a better accountability of the public utility and for an improved responsibility for the customers, contributing to an improved performance of the water service.