Abstract : The Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by the United Nations in September 2015 sets the ambitious goal of achieving universal access to safe water by 2030. This article explores the conditions for achieving this goal in Burkinabè small towns under public-private partnerships (PPP). It results from an action-research project that adopted a price-based methodology, and involved a researcher, the author, and high level sector stakeholders, in a one-year participatory process, for defining a water policy that would be equitable for users and financially sustainable for private operators engaged in 10-year affermage contracts. The conditions to universalise in an equitable way the access to safely managed water services in Burkina are to switch to solar energy and to enforce a consistent price-cap regulation.
