The management of community water supply systems in Ethiopia is facing a lot of problems. Non-functionality of water schemes may range from 20 to 37%, whereas non functionality of water points can be even considerably higher (Butterworth et al., 2009).
This is a serious situation but in practice conditions are even worse as many systems are showing substandard performance for lack of preventive maintenance which results in long waiting queues of users who often may receive unsafe water.
WASHCOs and Kebele leaders initiate actions that help to improve their WASH conditions, sometimes adopting very creative solutions for their problems. To make this wealth of experience available to others short write-ups are developed called GLOWSPROS (GLOWS Problems and Solutions), to help others to learn from this experience. Problems will clearly depend on the local situation and may be very diverse and sometimes complex. A good way to explore this is explained in a specific GLOWS module to build the capacity of WASHCOs .
GLoWS was developed in response to this situation. It is a problem-based learning approach that focuses on helping the trainees assess/frame WASH problems appropriately, and define practical actions to solve them. A key feature is that the training is provided to water professionals right at their workplace. This is important as government water bureaus in Ethiopia are under immense work pressure and cannot afford to let their staff go away for training for long periods of time. Trainers from local vocational training centres provide support and supervision from time-to-time. There is also a lot of focus on peer-to-peer learning and group work.
GLoWS was developed by MetaMeta, with support from Partners for Water, RiPPLE, IRC, SNV, WASTE, RAIN Foundation and UNICEF.
More info: GLOWS@metameta.nl
Produced by: TheWaterChannel
Year: 2013
Language: English
Region: Ethiopia
