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Published on: 30/09/2014

The MWA Ethiopia Program brings together a unique permanent coalition of NGOs – international and Ethiopian – that works across the country. Having already provided access to more than 1 million people over the past 10 years, the new phase from 2014-2017 is equally ambitious, seeking to support full WASH coverage in the same focus geographical areas.

The alliance also seeks to work a little differently in this phase, in particular giving more emphasis to the central role of government at all levels and investing more in dissemination and capacity building to support the enabling environment for WASH service delivery. As well as continuing previous work and approaches in rural water and sanitation, the alliance will promote innovations in areas such as Self-supply, financing, monitoring, sanitation marketing, water safety planning and locally integrated water resources management. Rafael Callejas from the US-based secretariat described it as 'working less on the way WASH used to be, but looking for possibilities to go to scale through influencing government policies, engaging with the private sector and testing innovations'.

Self-supply acceleration will be promoted by three lead partners (WVE, Care and CRS) with the support of IRC and Dutch foundation Aqua for All. The program also seeks to use Life Cycle Cost approaches to shine more light on where money goes and how budgets can be re-balanced to ensure that all costs vital to sustainability are covered such as post-construction support. The program will also use new monitoring technologies (FLOW) to show its progress and provide data more quickly to government, and use a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) framework to drive improvements in effectiveness. 

Opening the workshop on behalf of the State Minister, Ministry of Water Irrigation and Energy adviser Ato Tesfaye Fuchala welcomed the role of the program and wished it all success.

The MWA-Ethiopia Program secretariat is based from 2014 at World Vision Ethiopia. The new program runs from July 2014 to June 2017 with funding from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and other partners.

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