Rural roads are built to improve people's mobility and to enhance access to markets, administrative centres, schools and health posts, and are credited with important socio-economic changes. A less studied aspect is the impact of roads on hydrological resources, as roads interact with existing surface and groundwater flows, redistributing water-related hazards and resources across space with significant consequences on people and their livelihoods. In Ethiopia, the government has embarked on a massive road construction programme over the last decade, mainly to serve the needs of an essentially rural population and agrarian economy. In parallel, the government has also been investing significantly in water harvesting and conservation measures and irrigation to serve the needs of a population whose livelihoods depend heavily on rain-fed agriculture. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2014 in the semiarid region of Tigray, Ethiopia, this article explores the opportunities and potential for multifunctional infrastructures. We argue that the two distinctive objectives of improving road connectivity and water availability for irrigation are interlinked and can be served by the same infrastructure, which we call multifunctional roads.

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The New Delhi Statement of 1990 called for universal water supply coverage by the year 2000, a goal that was later replaced by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the timeframe of 2015. As we are fast approaching this deadline, discussions are already under way for targets beyond the MDGs. In the wake of these developments, it is worth taking stock of what we can learn from existing efforts to measure access to water supply, sanitation and hygiene services. This article zooms in on one aspect of sector monitoring -national inventories -carried out in many developing countries as a first step to improve sector performance monitoring. Using the example of the National WASH Inventory in Ethiopia, under way in 2010/11, as a case study, we examine possible reasons why so often these costly and human resourceintensive baselines tend to remain underutilised.