Access to drinking water remains a major challenge in several West African cities, particularly in Parakou (Benin), where existing public water infrastructure is struggling to meet growing demand. Faced with this deficiency, populations are developing alternative solutions such as Autonomous Water Posts (AWP), which are becoming essential levers of resilience. The research analyzes their role in helping populations adapt to the lack of water infrastructure. It is based on a mixed methodology that combines field surveys, semi-structured interviews, and direct observations. The results reveal that Parakou needs 1,631 water points, while it only has 184 functional structures, representing a coverage rate of 11.28% and a deficit of approximately 89%. This deficit is aggravated by an insufficient supply from SONEB, despite a 70% increase in production between 2019 and 2023. As a result, a deficit of approximately 2 million cubic meters of water remained in 2023. In this context, family (76.56%), community (7.34%) or denominational (16.09%) AWP have multiplied, particularly in the 2nd district and contribute 2.94% to meeting household water needs. All AWP contribute 41% of the water needs of the households concerned.
Eighty percent of respondents considered AWP a sustainable alternative, while the remaining 20 percent cited the high cost of implementation as the main obstacle to their adoption. The research suggests that these local initiatives should be supervised and integrated into public policies to strengthen equitable and sustainable access to drinking water.
Agriculture is the base of the economic growth of Benin. So the improvement of the outputs became a permanent concern of all the actors of the agricultural sector. Present research aims at studying the contribution of the installation of the underworld to the productivity of rice in the Commune of Boukoumbé. The adopted methodological approach is articulated around the document retrieval, the investigations of ground, the processing the data and the analysis of the results. The use of the Active Method of Participative Research (MARP) made it possible to collect information near the targeted made up actors of 50 producers, 20 persons in charge of groupings and 05 agents of rural framing. It arises from the study that the Commune of Boukoumbé has 67 underworld with a total surface area of 2106 ha whose 12 sites are arranged corresponding to a surface of 320 ha. The average outputs obtained for the two varieties are approximately 2.9380 t/ha on the level of the arranged underworld and 1.3073 t/ha for the non made-up underworld. The installation of the underworld thus represents a strategic axis for the increase in the especially rice agricultural productivity in the sector of study.