An alliance that could offer a new approach to multiple use services

Published on: 27/05/2013

On 11 April, just after the closure of the IRC symposium,  I attended the launch of a new project, held in the Hilton hotel in Addis. While it's another project, and of limited duration, there is something innovative and new here. In funding the project (and putting plenty of Coca-Cola red on the stage), The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation is providing extra funds to help an existing effort go further.

The key approach is to promote Multiple Use water Services so that water projects serve more of the demands of the population in these areas.

This doesn't happen often enough. Usually when something starts to work and the gremlins have been ironed out of an approach, interest has moved on and the funding dries up. In this new project, three Millennium Water Alliance partners will use additional funding from the The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation to deepen their existing interventions (part of the Conrad N Hilton Foundation-funded programme by the Millennium Water Alliance in Ethiopia). The key new idea – new to explicit mainstream programming anyway, as some NGOs do integrate aspects of their interventions – is to promote Multiple Use water Services so that water projects serve more of the demands of the population in these areas. In one area, Catholic Relief Services are working out in a pilot (with the Ministry of Water and Energy) how Self-supply could be promoted alongside community supplies so that there is more water available for domestic and productive uses.

Watch their promotional film here:

IRC provided a training course in Multiple Use water Services (MUS) to MWA members in Ethiopia earlier in the year. We look forward to going back and seeing how the approach is being applied in practice.