Climate Resilience of small-town water utilities in Eastern Ethiopia

Abstract

Building a resilient water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) system is more important than ever since climate change threatens WASH, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. The Government of Ethiopia stresses climate-resilient WASH through its One WASH National Program, albeit it may be challenging to ascertain the resilience due to the absence of an easy-to-use monitoring tool. The “How tough is WASH” framework is a recently developed framework to monitor the community-managed rural water supply resilience to climate change. We investigated whether this framework might be used to assess the resilience of small-town water utilities by choosing 10 communities in eastern Ethiopia. The How Tough is WASH framework considers resilience along six domains: supply chain, institutional support, management and governance, community role and feedback, infrastructure, and catchment using a five-scale measurement. Due to its complexity to apply using a five-scale measure, we modified the framework into a simpler 3-point scale —low, medium, and high—to assess the climate change resilience of urban water utilities. Accordingly, the town water utilities rated moderately resilient, with primary failures including insufficient government support, a lack of flood protection, seasonal variation in yield, and leakage in the distribution system. Fixing the identified failures is essential for resilient services in the study towns. The current finding using the How Tough is WASH framework revealed the framework’s versatility in determining the climate resilience of WASH, therefore, should be included and integrated into a WASH monitoring tool.