Need of Services and Understanding of Service Providers in Water and Sanitation: A Case of Ethiopia

Water and sanitation services are basic requirements for the development of a nation. The provision of these services should necessarily be arranged by the national government through policies, and long-term and short-term plans. Moreover, follow-up of the implementation of principle in policies and plans will determine the service level on the ground. This paper is intended to explore gaps in the policy-making and implementation in the areas of water supply in Ethiopia. Review of Ethiopian water sector policy, universal access plans, growth and transformation plans and other literature are employed to achieve the objective of this paper. Moreover, the experiences of the first author that he acquired during data collection for his doctoral study are taken into account to draw conclusions. Hence, the study shows that standards set at the federal level fail to consider the actual situation on the ground and the experts at implementation level are to interpret some aspects of the policy ambiguously. Therefore, this paper recommends the policy-makers and higher officials to consult the people in charge of putting policies in effect to have contextualized and work for uniform desired- output. Service providers need to understand the notion of the receiving community in order to provide the services that satisfy the users.