The wait for water sometimes felt endless. “When the water point, pump, and generator faced difficulty, it took a long time to fix,” recalls Feleke Abera, a resident of Wita, a rural kebele (village) in south-central Ethiopia. “Sometimes it took up to three months.”
Numerous studies have sought to understand the factors that most influence the sustainability of rural water supply services. This understanding has led to the development of maintenance approaches, both reactive and preventive, that seek to improve functionality rates and maintain reliable continuity of rural community water services. This document reviews literature about the factors influencing the sustainability of rural water services, and the emerging maintenance approaches seeking to address these factors and improve service reliability.
Tesfa Walelign is an Ethiopian farmer who is traveling the hard road from food assistance to self-reliance.
As we celebrate World Toilet Day and the transformative health and economic impacts of access to improved sanitation this November 19, USAID takes you from Ethiopia to Indonesia in this photo essay to showcase how innovative thinking, government action, and private sector participation are collectively improving sanitation around the world. Learn how USAID is helping contribute to our partner countries’ progress toward safe sanitation for all.
The startup has been mostly self-funded, but has been selected into the USAID Development Innovation Ventures program, which is supporting its operations for the next couple of years. Triple Bottom Line (3BL) Enterprises is working on a project called Flowius, which builds tech-managed, piped water systems so “radically affordable” that rural Ethiopians living on US$1.50 a day can get water where they want it most – in their homes.
The United States, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), partnered with DuPont Water Solutions and the Afar Regional State government unveils a state-of-the-art reverse osmosis water system in the community of Serdo.
Muhammed Ibrahim is a local facilitator in Ethiopia working on USAID’s Sustainable WASH Systems Learning Partnership (SWS). His job is to improve the sanitation systems in the small towns of Debre Birhan and Woliso using an unconventional approach. He isn’t building toilets or educating people on the need for safe sanitation. Instead, Muhammed and his team are supporting local government staff, residents, and private companies to work together to address complex systematic issues as a collective. This approach is called collective action.
This report provides a synthesis of various rural water studies and systems analyses undertaken in two rural woredas (districts) in Ethiopia: South Ari, in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region (SNNPR), and Mile, in the Afar Region. The Sustainable WASH Systems Learning Partnership conducted these assessments with representatives from local government and the USAID Lowland WASH Activity. The baseline studies include an asset inventory, service delivery assessment, life-cycle cost analysis, sustainability check, organizational network analysis, and factor mapping.
To address health challenges related to rapid urbanization, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-supported Strengthening Ethiopia’s Urban Health Program (SEUHP) will promote urban health leadership and provide capacity building support in cities and towns across seven regions in Ethiopia. SEUHP extends the commitment of the previous USAID/Urban Health Extension Program (USAID/UHEP) by providing the Government of Ethiopia (GoE), civil society partners, and urban communities of Ethiopia with cost-effective, high quality, and appropriately targeted support and services.
In Ethiopia and Uganda, the Sustainable WASH Systems Learning Partnership (SWS) developed and piloted a novel Factor Mapping approach to better understand the complex relationships between factors that influence water, sanitation, and hygiene services. The Factor Mapping process is a stakeholder-driven decision support technique that generates systems-based insights into how factors interact as a complex and dynamic system to affect WASH service delivery outcomes.
