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.
USAID/Ethiopia seeks to support the improvement of access to clean and sustainable water sources for target communities in the Afar, Oromia, and Somali Regions of Ethiopia.
In order to improve access to water in these regions, it is recommended that additional boreholes be drilled in strategic locations, and existing non-functional boreholes be repaired where feasible and the original causes of inoperability can be determined and corrected.
In Ethiopia, despite increases in water supply and sanitation coverage in rural areas and a favorable policy environment, only an estimated 30% of the rural population had basic drinking water service, and as few as 4% had basic sanitation in 2015 (WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme). As assessed by UNICEF Ethiopia, 60-80% of communicable diseases are attributed to low levels of access to safe water and inadequate sanitation and hygiene services, while poor WaSH is a major contributor to mal- and undernutrition[1].
Transform: Primary Health Care (PHC) works to strengthen Ethiopia’s health system, increase the quality of service delivery across the continuum of care, and improve household and community health practices and health-seeking behaviors. TRANSFORM:PHC will work in more than 400 rural woredas of Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, and Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples regions, benefiting almost 42 million people.
The USAID Transform Health in Developing Region program is managed by Amref Health Africa in partnership with Project HOPE, Intra Health International and General Electric and funded by USAID. The activity is implemented with the aim of contributing to the equity and quality of health services in the four regions and support the Government of Ethiopia’s overall effort to achieve the Health Sector Transformation Plan (HSTP).
Food for the Hungry Ethiopia (FHE) has been implementing the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded Targeted Response for Agriculture, Income and Nutrition (TRAIN) project in support of the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in six chronically food insecure and drought prone Woredas of Amhara Region. The targeted Woredas include Lay Gayint, Tach Gayint, and Simada in South Gondar Zone as well as Ziquala, Sahila, and Abergelie in Wag-Himra Zone.
