Water access and sanitation

Water access and sanitation are crucial development goals, in Ethiopia access to drinking water is still scarce, particularly in remote areas. Although governmental and international programs have helped improve safe water access, the population growth has outpaced these efforts. In rural areas, only 53% of the population has access to drinking water, 6% of the population to safely managed service (UN, 2024).

For example, roughly 57% of rural households have access to an improved source of drinking water, compared with about 97% of urban households, but safely managed water is only around for approximately 5% of the rural population in 2020 estimates. Moreover, 91.8% of rural households rely on unimproved sanitation facilities, compared to 67.7 percent of urban households. Projects such as the Ethiopia WASH Sustainable Services Program have provided improved sanitation to 5.6 million rural people since 2014, alongside 1.2 million latrines, yet rural regions like Somali and Afar lag severely due to poverty and mobility.

The fieldwork activity has documented a similar scenario: more than half of interviewed households have an unsupervised access to water from springs or streams, only 1 out of 3 respondents have access through private pipes.

The lack of improved infrastructure has detrimental consequences to overall sanitation level and hygiene in rural villages. Less than 10% of rural Ethiopia population has an adequate or limited sanitation level, while more than 20% still is forced to defecate outdoors thus increasing health and biological risks (WashData, 2025). Water quality and sanitation are leading factors impacting individuals’ lives, particularly children. The absence of adequate levels of sanitation and hygiene is the leading cause of specific diseases in children, primarily diarrhea (Usman et al., 2019).

The interviews collected display that open defecation is predominant in our setting, more than half of the interviewed families adopt this methodology, while less than 10% have modern toilets; the remaining use wooden toilets.