Scaling up management of water supply and sanitation services: Ethiopian experience

The major problem facing the development of water supply and sanitation sector is sustainability of the completed water schemes. The reasons for the failure of the schemes are many, which could be categorized in broad terms, as social, institutional, technical, financial and environmental. The current statistics indicate that 20-40 % of the completed water supply schemes are not functional due to the reasons mentioned above. Plan Ethiopia, an international NGO, has taken up the initiative to coordinate an action research for scaling up community managed water supply and sanitation services by involving stakeholders in the sub-sector to give guidance and coordinate activities through their good offices to study the support mechanisms required for sustainability and then replicate the results at regional and national levels.