Progress in Self Supply in Ethiopia

Published on: 13/11/2012

There is more and more interest in Self Supply in Ethiopia. It has been recognised in official policy documents (such as the statement to the 2012 High Level Meeting of Sanitation and Water for All) and now development partners, regions and NGOs are taking the issue up. For example, Oromia recently released ambitious plans for the next financial year, and UNICEF is leading a new integrated project that includes Self Supply as a service delivery model. These developments are driven, firstly, by the fact that there are gaps in conventional water supply, especially in serving more scattered settlements affordably and sustainability. Secondly, there is the emergence of Self Supply as a complementary approach. Self Supply also tends to support productive activities at the household level as well as being a source of water for drinking, washing and other domestic uses.

These developments in Self Supply policy have been based upon stakeholder meetings (there have been two national consultation meetings in 2008 and 2011) and empirical research (two major studies are summarized in the recent report 'A hidden resource').

The Ministry of Water and Energy (MoWE) wants to accelerate Self Supply and make it safer, because there is still much untapped shallow groundwater and because many of the family wells developed by households are poorly protected and providing unsafe water. How to accelerate Self Supply is now the major challenge.

MoWE and its partners are pursuing two approaches. The first approach (household-led investment) builds upon the widespread existing development of family wells through own investment and without subsidy. There is, however, a big challenge in operationalizing this Self Supply approach for the government. How to implement it? It requires a way of working that is completely opposite to how current water supply systems are planned and financed. In community water supplies, we identify areas of need, identify the specific sites for new infrastructure and then finance the project so it gets built. But in Self Supply, it is households that decide what to do. They choose the sites, technologies and fund all the work themselves and decide when to do it. And they do this in small and affordable incremental steps to move up the Self Supply ladder from basic to improved sources. In many respects the approach needed is more like the implementation of Community-Led Total Sanitation.

Government can promote demand, promote safer and better technologies, build up capacities and the enabling environment at various levels and monitor the outcomes. There is a need to: raise awareness in the safe development of household level sources and create demand; get Micro-Finance Institutions interested and lending to support new sources and upgrading; build up the private sector and related supply chains to provide more well digging services, protection for wells, and parts and pumps through their supply chains; to develop better technologies and make them more accessible; and to train regional, woreda level staff in the technical, financial and marketing knowledge needed to support individual households. The need then is for government to invest in software rather than hardware, and to provide support when requested. This all represents a major paradigm shift, even for a complementary approach that will sit alongside community-managed water supplies.

The second approach is ‘group-led investment’ and aims to develop a model for partially-subsidised community managed supplies which are better suited to rural areas with scattered populations than conventional community developed water supply systems. The idea is to provide a 50% subsidy to a group of households (around 10 households) that want to invest in a jointly-owned source. The challenge to this approach is the estimated high cost. Since systems should provide a safe water, a well fitted with a handpump has been proposed as the basic option (similar to normal community water supplies), but for only 50 or so people this results in too high a per capita cost even with a 50% community contribution. There are also questions to be addressed around sustainability and organisation. Households have been found willing to invest in upgrading family wells because they own them, but will they also invest in maintenance and making improvements for jointly owned schemes? Many community water supplies are not adequately maintained.

Such group-led investment is known in Amhara region but in other areas it is a new approach, and piloting will be needed. The advantage with the approach is that it can be planned by government through a more conventional planning approach with target numbers of wells set in focus areas and budgeting made for the more conventional hardware costs (50%). Efforts need to be made to reduce the estimated cost through considering different technology options, and to identify the most effective financing arrangements for the partial subsidy whether by providing the pump as the government contribution, routing funds via Micro-Finance Institutions (as is done in the Community Managed Project approach) or through Woredas and their water offices. The recent developments in legalisation of Water User Groups leaves out these small groups and may need to be revisited, with the limit set to 20 households in some regions. As in household-led approaches, manual drilling is a promising technology for small diameter boreholes as are rope pumps and household water treatment options.

The current challenge is now to develop implementation modalities for each of these models, to secure more funding from federal and regional governments and development partners, and to coordinate efforts. A dedicated team within the MoWE, and a Self Supply Working Group that involves key stakeholders, have been established to support the effort. A wider group of partners, including NGOs, Micro-Finance Institutions, researchers, the private sector, and complementary government-led programmes in small-scale irrigation, community-led total sanitation, and household water treatment also now need to be more engaged. Comments and suggestions on the next steps would be welcomed.