Effective and sustainable WASH services: a case study of Community Managed Project (CMP) approach in Ethiopia

This case presents the development and scaling up of the Community Managed Project (CMP) approach. It is a rural WASH project implementation modality developed in Finland-Ethiopia bilateral projects. The approach was initiated in 2003 and in 2011 it was scaled-up to the national level where it is currently implemented in 76 districts in five regions. The key feature of CMP is the decentralization of the project’s financial and managerial accountability to community level. To date more than 10,000 schemes have been constructed with CMP. This paper describes how the approach works, its results, challenges and a number of lessons learned. CMP has achieved a great speed and efficiency of construction and high functionality of the schemes while some challenges remain in the area of trust on community’s capacity to manage the schemes. The next step will be scaling-up the approach to sector-wide implementation.