Selamawit Tiruneh, Regional Coordinator, Millenium Water Alliance, Ethiopia
Regional Coordinator Millennium Water Alliance, Ethiopia
Published on: 31/10/2024
In the pursuit of safe water for all, no individual saves the day. Many hands get the job done. No single solution or organisation can solve the global water crisis. In this interview, Selemawit Tiruneh shares her views on the power of working together in Ethiopia.
"My name is Selamawit Tiruneh, I am working for the Millennium Water Alliance, as regional coordinator, for the Sustainable WASH programme. I’m based in Bahir Dar, the capital city of Amhara Region.
My job is to coordinate the programme partners. Any meeting, any learning programme, or learning visit, I coordinate with programme partners and government, including regional government. My role is bringing everyone, every WASH actor, in the region, together and to bring everyone on the same page.
We are seven programme partners and work in three woredas. We plan together, we share updates together, and if there is learning, we share our learning together.
We come together every two months to share updates. We gather together in Bahir Dar city. And if there is a challenge, we discuss and set action plans. Sometimes we bring someone from government, or someone from another NGO, or from different woredas.
I usually set the agenda and send them a week ahead and they add something. After a meeting, we always produce documents, meeting minutes. We share those to all people working on this alliance.
All our partners are working in different countries and in different working situations, so we learn continuously new things. That is special. We learn so much things when we come together.
If there is a thing that we need to scale up, we bring in government. We bring together the woreda government people, the woreda programme team people, the regional government people. We arrange a learning visit for that specific area and we explain everything there. So at that time, the government can take that new learning from us.
Access to water, it is everything. It is dignity. It is life. It is economy. Delivering safely managed water to the anyone means it is everything for that person. It's difficult to explain but it is everything, I prefer to say that. So, for me working together means bringing all powers to the same thing. That is powerful by itself and it makes change, simply, easily."
The Millennium Water Alliance is one of the grantees supported by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, under the Safe Water Initiative. This initiative focuses on systems strengthening and service delivery to ensure reliable and safely managed water to one million people in low-income households, health facilities and schools in Ethiopia, Ghana and Uganda.
As part of its five-year strategic plan, Conrad N. Hilton commissioned a review of its investments and approaches in the target geographies. The primary aim of the review was to investigate the relevance, effectiveness and sustainability of different Service Delivery Models (SDM), including community-based safe water management, publicly owned water utilities and private-sector approaches such as Safe Water Enterprises (SWE).
In 2023, as part of the review, IRC produced on behalf of Aguaconsult Ltd and for the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation the film 'In service to everyone'. For this film, IRC's Dechan Dalrymple and Tsegaye Yeshiwas, interviewed Selamwit Tiruneh in September. This article is an adaptation and summarised version of the full interview.