In the middle of 2025, mid-year water quality tests in South Ari district, southern Ethiopia, showed that drinking water failed WHO standards. Within days, the district activated its own Water Safety Plans. Within seven months, water quality had recovered, through more frequent chlorination, better-protected sources, enforced safety rules and communities making the plans their own.
Many district water offices fail this kind of test frequently – because nobody's measuring, and even when someone is, the numbers rarely reach anyone with the authority to act on them. Water is rarely just water. It's one part of the same system that includes clinics, schools and budgets. Water failures become health failures, and health failures become education failures, as sick children miss school. We believe governments are best placed to run the systems that keep their own citizens safe. Eight years of systemic work in South Ari meant the district knew what to do when there was a crisis.
We began working directly with South Ari’s Water and Energy Office in 2017, helping to build the district’s own planning, monitoring, financing and water resource management from the ground up, using our people and tools. The turning point came when the district chose to write its own water and sanitation master plan, with our tools and facilitation, but owned from inside the Water and Energy Office. That plan became the district's working reference for budgeting and reporting. It also gave the offices of water, education, health, finance, women and children, and the woreda administration a reason to sit at the same table.
Ajele Getu, head of the South Ari Water and Energy Office, has watched this shift from the inside. "The community mobilisation improved community awareness and reduced dependency on the woreda government budget alone," he says. That mobilisation is visible in Shishir kebele, where the local water federation built its own office using community labour and materials, and keeps meticulous monthly records of every scheme, records which used to exist, if at all, in someone's memory. Taye Tamru, who leads the team that manages the district’s drinking water supply, put it simply: "I am 100% certain about the data system in South Ari Woreda."
Four in ten people in South Ari now have water they can count on, up from two in ten since the master plan was completed in 2019, and a district-wide health check of the system – covering everything from financing to maintenance to monitoring – has moved from mostly red flags in 2017 to mostly green ones now. But the deeper change is in who owns the system. Every woreda in Ari zone now has its own master plan and a shared, cloud-based monitoring system, something the zone asked for once South Ari's version proved its worth. None of this means the pressure is off. Rising costs, ageing infrastructure and a widening gap between demand and government budgets all present challenges.
South Ari is not the only district facing that pressure. We're continuing to work with South Ari and other districts, and we'd like to talk to governments facing similar questions elsewhere. Call us – let's talk through what ownership could look like for your system.