Accountability for Water Programme Launches in Ethiopia

Ethiopian watershed. Photo: Water Witness

The Accountability for Water programme formally launched in Ethiopia last month, at a joint workshop hosted with the Ethiopian Water Technology Institute in Addis Ababa on 23rd November. The event was attended by diverse participants from government, NGOs/CSOs, the private sector, research institutes and academia.

Critical issues facing the Ethiopian water sector were discussed, recognising the urgent need to strengthen accountable water governance and service delivery. The Programme was praised by partners as “a pioneer initiative”, bridging policies and laws to their purpose through innovative and robust accountability mechanisms.  

The plenary featured presentations made by four Professional Research Fellows (PRFs), whom the programme is supporting to undertake investigations on neglected aspects of water accountability.

The four PRF projects presented and discussed were:

• Strengthening Regulatory Practices in WASH Policy and Strategy Execution: Options for better WASH Service Delivery (PRF from the Ministry of Water and Energy);

• Accountability in the One WASH National Program (OWNP) of Ethiopia: The Case of Gozamen and Woliso Districts (PRF from Population Services International);

• Protecting Local Community Water User Rights over Alwero Dam through Holding Government Water Licensing Authorities Accountable (PRF from Addis Ababa University); and

• Wastewater Governance in upstream Koka Catchment of Awash Basin: Livelihood, health and environmental effects, challenges, and opportunities for better accountability (PRF from the Ministry of Water and Energy).

 Concerns and ideas reflected on in the workshop were cross-cutting and of wider relevance to the sector beyond Ethiopia, including:

• The focus on constructing new WASH facilities has resulted in neglect of the operation, maintenance, and rehabilitation of existing infrastructures. While there is good knowledge of scheme non-functionality, this weakness has persisted without holding responsible parties to account. National and global targets are calculated based on new facilities erected, and older facilities are assumed to be functional while calculating national coverage and attainment of global objectives. This needs to be subject to critical scrutiny, and one may want to ask if global targets may have undesired effects in this respect.    

• The impact of expanding urbanisation, growing industries and farms that consume more water, and changing lifestyles of the public that goes with more use of water, are additional factors determining the increase between the two national WASH inventories (2012 and 2018). Global success stories of the water sector may need to be reassessed taking non-functionality of facilities into account, in addition to new ones. 

• The governance system needs to be robust enough to face scrutiny. Elites need not consider accountability as inviting unnecessary burden, which seems to be the case. While having policies and laws in place is necessary in the first instance, this must be coupled with implementation. Policies, laws, and proclamations cannot solve most problems on their own. Hence, they should be accompanied by explicit obligations and sanctions. There must be consequences for broken promises.

Other issues underlined at the workshop were:

• Communities can only hold authorities accountable when they are equipped with information, a right that needs to be fulfilled by service providers;

• Traditional laws and practices function along with formal laws and regulations and deserve researching;

• There is an urgent need to deal with wastewater/water pollutions despite having environmental policy and laws;

• Ensuring decentralised practices are enshrined in the law need to be adequately implemented;

• Clearing overlapping mandates and strengthening inter-sectoral collaboration .

The workshop participants interrogated the root causes of weak accountability; why secrecy, mismanagement and corruption continues while we are aware of this; and what further knowledge is indispensable to answer these important questions.

• Mulugeta Gashaw, Ethiopia National Research Coordinator