In Pictures: Water still a luxury in Ethiopia
While 52 percent of Ethiopia's people have access to improved water, only 10
percent have water piped into their homes.
<
http://www.aljazeera.com/profile/ioana-moldovan.html> Ioana Moldovan
Last updated: 05 Sep 2014 07:32
Thirty years after Ethiopia's devastating famine, water is still as
inaccessible as it is precious. While 52 percent of the people have access
to improved water, only 10 percent have water piped into their homes. And in
rural areas, this figure is as low as 1 percent. Only 24 percent have
adequate sanitation.
The implications are extremely broad. In an agriculture-based country, water
shortages largely affect not only the country's economy, but also the basic
life of people whose subsistence depends on each season's crops. Often poor
countries like Ethiopia, with high population growth, are the most
vulnerable to water stress.
Not to mention that on a continent currently affected by major diseases,
controlling outbreaks is also a question of access to water and sanitation.
There are a lot of factors contributing to the lack of access to water and
sanitation, ranging from environmental degradation due to desertification
and deforestation, natural disasters such as extreme drought and climate
change resulting from global warming. Other factors include pollution,
caused by massive congestions in urban areas. This has led to a vicious
cycle: people are leaving rural areas due to poverty hoping to find better
opportunities in the cities only to contribute to the depreciation of living
conditions where they arrive by overpopulating the towns' slums.
The government has expanded its social service delivery programmes; NGOs
projects are improving life in some communities, but it is a long process
and on the larger scale, the infrastructure handling Ethiopia's water supply
is still inadequate and the need for improved water and sanitation is still
severe........
Read and see the pictures in PDF below:
Berhane Habtemariam
Received on Fri Sep 05 2014 - 17:32:31 EDT