COWASH Phase III: The Rationale Behind
COWASH Phase III: The Rationale Behind
Government of Ethiopia, following a successful Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP I) implementation July 2010-June 2015, adopted another ambitious 5-year plan for July 2015-June 2020 and it is called second Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP II). The water GTP II target is to increase safe water supply service level and improve urban waste water management system. It also targets to ensure good governance in rural water supply enhancing sustainability, effectiveness, efficiency, and climate resilience of the service and build the sub-sectors’ overall capacity.
In retrospect, in the preceding times, to catalyze harmonized WASH implementation, Ethiopia adopted a widely hailed programmatic implementation strategy called WASH Implementation Framework (WIF). Besides disabling the fragmented and uncoordinated project based implementation, Ethiopia is introducing and showcasing a harmonized, aligned, integrated and coordinated model in the provision of sustainable safe water and improved sanitation and hygiene services for all. This is the underpinning background on which GTP II envisages its targets.
This new strategy, with several implementation approaches, and the accomplished notable results, played crucial role in convincing development partners such as the Government of Finland to continue supporting the sector development. It is to be recalled that Finland’s support to the Ethiopian WASH sector started with the introduction of Rural Water Supply and Environmental Program (RWSEP) in Amhara region in 1994, a bilateral project between governments of Ethiopia and Finland.
After 17 years of intervention, benefiting 1.7 million people in 20 districts of Amhara region, RWSEP was replaced with Community-Led Accelerated WASH (COWASH) project in 2011. COWASH Phase I and II (2011-2016) was tasked to further develop and scale up Community Managed Project (CMP) approach to national level. CMP was developed in 2003 in RWSEP.
In the last 22 years, RWSEP, COWASH and FinnWASH-BG project, another bilateral WASH project between the two governments, have provided safe water supply to 4 million rural Ethiopians. From this, COWASH alone in the last 5 years has contributed safe water to more than 2 million rural Ethiopians. This impressive success was cited as another contributing factor for Finland to continue COWASH for another 3 years more. Furthermore Finland decided to join the group of donors (World Bank, DFID, African Development Bank and UNICEF) contributing to the One WASH National Program (OWNP)-Consolidated WASH Account Project.
The method deployed by the project to transfer finance for construction of safe water supplies and institutional sanitation services is another interesting factor behind Finland’s assertion and decision to continue supporting COWASH. In this project, investment funds which are generated from the regional government budget coffin flow directly to the target communities through micro finance institutions (MFIs). Government of Finland support is channeled to capacity building. The model is roundly applauded as innovative and effective.
In addition to successfully removing the bureaucratic barriers that cause unnecessary, and sometimes annoying, delay of procurement, this method ushered in a phenomenon juncture to ensure empowerment of a community who is responsible to procure and implement its own WASH project. In effect this approach enabled the sharp rise of sense of ownership among the user communities.
As strong correlative relation between a sense of ownership and sustainability reported in various studies, COWASH supported implementation model is an automatic pick for the achievement of sustainable development goals. The strong ownership is one of the many comparative advantages of CMP over the other WASH implementation approaches. (For more read the CMP section.) Finland’s strong belief in CMP approach is another reason for the advent of COWASH Phase III (July 2016 - June 2019).
The total implementation budget of COWASH Phase III project is nearly € 40 million. The Government of Ethiopia, Government of Finland and user communities, the joint financers, will fund 59 %, 33% and 8 % of the project cost respectively.
In this phase, reckoning rough estimation, cost sharing percentages are between recipient, Ethiopia and Ethiopians, and the donor, Finland is 30 and 70 respectively. This approach where the lion’s share holder is the recipient country demonstrates the commitment of the recipient to tackle the WASH challenges. Finland views this model as a giant leap towards ensuring long lasting projects; a cornerstone to attain the global and national WASH targets.
At the end of this phase, COWASH targets to reach about 1.1 million new rural people with safe water through supporting construction of about 5,000 – 6,000 new improved community water supply systems. With regard to sanitation, it aims to reach about 1 million people will access and use of improved sanitation and hygiene facilities. Finally, it is projected that about 140,000 new beneficiaries will be served by better institutional WASH facilities in about 280 institutions.
General Outcomes
The underlying assumption of the planned support is that quantity (i.e. improved access), and quality (i.e. improved and sustainable service delivery and capacity development) are equally important and the implementation needs to be well coordinated. Increasing the access of communities to safe water, sanitation and hygiene by providing physical structures is essential, but not sufficient on its own. Sustainability, functionality and use of these structures are equally essential for maximizing the potential benefits of the built structures. Only by using a comprehensive approach incorporating physical construction, quality of service delivery and capacity development, can both quantity and quality of the services be ensured, expected outcomes achieved and health and other impacts of the increased coverage in water supply and sanitation attained. Planned support and expected outcomes focus on coverage, quality and comprehensiveness of service delivery and capacity development with focus on CMP and its scaling up which together make a comprehensive package for improving and ensuring quality of rural WASH.
CMP has been recognized as an implementation modality of rural WASH in Ethiopia in WASH Implementation Framework, OWNP document and Consolidated WASH Account Program Operational Manual. Further there is a broad consensus that community involvement creates strong ownership and eventually leads to higher functionality of schemes. There is also a common understanding that it results in higher implementation rates (efficiency) and cost effectiveness. It is important that the results, lessons and achieved development through CPM approach in COWASH are effectively communicated to WASH stakeholder and other interested and potential participants of WASH in Ethiopia and beyond. Therefore, information and promotion of CMP is included as a cross cutting-theme in the activities of each outcome of the project.
COWASH Phase III is essentially a capacity development program, and capacity development cuts also across all outcomes at all levels. This ensures that construction and service delivery are of good quality, results are achieved as planned and that results are sustainable and that learning is used for advocacy at all levels.
General outcome indicators
The improved access to water and sanitation is expected to have a positive impact particularly on the health status of the beneficiary population, and especially among the children, through reduction of incidences of diarrhea and water borne diseases. Increased access to standard water and sanitation services combined with improved quality of service delivery and women’s empowerment through WASH-related activities and women entrepreneurship development will have a positive impact particularly on women’s life.
The impact indicators and targets for development objective are a) reduction of incidences of diarrhea, b) reduction in under 5 mortality rate, c) increased % of WASHCOs with more than 50% of female members and d) increased income of female entrepreneurs selling WASH products in the program regions.
