the potential of Self Supply in Ethiopia

Ethiopia has launched a Universal Access Plan (UAP) to achieve safe water supply and sanitation for the country’s 77 million people by 2012. This would mean providing safe water service to 50.9 million new users in just 7 years. The government recently reviewed the progress of UAP and concluded that it would be challenging to achieve its targets with the existing implementation approach. The review strongly recommended that low-cost options need to be pursued to accelerate progress. Self Supply is proposed to be one such approach, providing safe water supply to households without external subsidy. This paper briefly discusses the practice and potential of Self Supply approach; and proposes key next steps needed to help achieve the UAP target for safe water supply in Ethiopia. Background The Government of Ethiopia is implementing the Universal Access Plan for water supply, hygiene and sanitation sector since 2006. UAP objectives include achieving universal (98%) access to safe water supplies for the country’s 77 million people by 2012 (MoWR,2006). This would mean providing services to 50.9 million new users in just 7 years. This is obviously a very ambitious plan given the huge number of people without access to this vital service. The task is even more challenging if we consider a backlog of more than 30 % of water supply schemes that have ceased to provide service due to various reasons. Heavy reliance o