IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fpr/esspdp/8.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The governance of service delivery for the poor and women: A study of rural water supply in Ethiopia

Author

Listed:
  • Mogues, Tewodaj
  • Cohen, Marc J.
  • Birner, Regina
  • Lemma, Mamusha
  • Randriamamonjy, Josee
  • Tadesse, Fanaye
  • Paulos, Zelekawork

Abstract

This study presents empirical findings on drinking water supply in Ethiopia from a set of qualitative and quantitive surveys on rural public services. Access to safe drinking water is very low: 32% of the surveyed households use safe drinking water sources, and the average time to get to safe water sources during dry season ranged from 29 minutes to 82 minutes. The households covered in the Ethiopia survey may still have better access than the national average. Households identify drinking water as their main priority concern, yet they report high satisfaction rates and hardly take any action to complain. 71% of the households were very or somewhat satisfied with the quantity and 52% with the quality of drinking water, even though access was very low. What is surprising with these findings is the fact that a considerable share of the households identified water as their number one concern among a series of services in their area. This raises questions about how best to elicit information about satisfaction with rural services. Drinking water has undergone far-reaching decentralisation. The construction and major rehabilitation of drinking water facilities is managed by district water desks, which are backstopped by the Regional Water Bureaus. Water committees have been established, each of which usually manages one water facility. Making water committees inclusive seems challenging. Although bringing water to the household is predominantly a task undertaken by women (and their children), the study found that in all sites except for one, the water committee leaders were men The water committees also do not seem to be very effective in counteracting the top-down nature of service provision. The study found that in some cases the functioning of water facilities was compromised if the organization that constructed the facility did not take into account the community’s knowledge of water sources in determining where to locate the facility.

Suggested Citation

  • Mogues, Tewodaj & Cohen, Marc J. & Birner, Regina & Lemma, Mamusha & Randriamamonjy, Josee & Tadesse, Fanaye & Paulos, Zelekawork, 2009. "The governance of service delivery for the poor and women: A study of rural water supply in Ethiopia," ESSP discussion papers 8, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    • Handle: RePEc:fpr:esspdp:8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifpri.org/cdmref/p15738coll2/id/130937/filename/131148.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Renkow, Mitch & Slade, Roger, 2013. "An assessment of IFPRI's work in Ethiopia 1995-2010: Ideology, influence, and idiosyncrasy," Impact assessments 36, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fpr:esspdp:8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifprius.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.