This fact sheet highlights SWS’s work in Ethiopia and Uganda, where SWS is working with local actors to better understand and strengthen local systems for rural water and small-town sanitation service delivery. In each location, SWS is promoting and facilitating learning alliances as a vehicle for more sector coordination and innovation. These platforms bring together actors at the district and town levels around a shared vision to develop and execute collective actions to strengthen systems for sustaining WASH services.

USAID is committed to exploring new ideas to achieving increased access to urban sanitation services.

As organizations work to improve WASH services, what effect do their relationships with one another play in strengthening the local systems that underpin service delivery? The Sustainable WASH Systems (SWS) Learning Partnership employed network analysis to help answer this question for specific woredas and towns in Ethiopia (South Ari, Mille, and Woliso). SWS is supporting locally-led platforms to increase collaboration and knowledge sharing among stakeholders for improved efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability of local WASH services.

On February 21, 2018, the Sustainable WASH Systems Learning Partnership (SWS) conducted a webinar that provides an introduction to network analysis and early lessons learned from analyses conducted in Ethiopia, Uganda, and Cambodia. SWS is using such analyses to better understand the complex interactions and interdependencies of actors in a local WASH system, with the ultimate goal of increasing the sustainability of WASH services.