According to the available data only about 41.0% (35.6% of rural & 82.3% of urban) the total population of Oromia has access to potable water (OWRB, 2004). Moreover, only 17% of the population of the region has access to sanitation facilities, out of which 13% is rural and 57% urban (ESP, 2002). The region has about 1.7 million hectares of potential irrigable land out of which only 5% is so far has been developed; indicating that the region has still a long way to go to properly and effectively utilize this potential resource to contribute to the attainment of food self sufficiency.

Considerable endeavors have been made to bring about an increase in the water supply coverage both in rural and urban centers of Oromia. The large-scale multi-aanaa gravity schemes that extend for tens of kilometers are supplying potable water to thousands of rural residents. Recently, by giving great emphasis to the human resources the region has about 50,000 families and community hand dug wells and spring on- spot developments have been carried-out within a year. These and the conventional deep and shallow wells that are developed in the past ten years have raised the potable water supply coverage form 23.5% at the end of 1987 to its current stage. The rural service coverage has risen from 17% in 1987 to 35.6 % at present, while urban water supply has increased from 73.5% to 82.3% during the same period. Overall about 3 million people have benefited from these projects. Those projects completed in 2005 and the near completion urban and large-scale rural water supply projects are expected to raise these figures by significant amount. At present the World Bank has assigned USD 33 Million that is expected to benefit 130 rural anaas and 72 urban centers. The two new large-scale rural water supply projects, Gimbichu-Fentale and Igo-Lole, are designed to serve many aanaas /districts/. Apart from the government effort about 46 NGOs have engaged in water supply project with annual budget of about 90 million ETB and are playing significant role to alleviate the water supply problem of the region.

Despite the heavy investment in the water supply sub sector the coverage has shown a marginal improvement of only 8.8% for urban and 18.4% for rural. As compared to the previous decades the increment looks significant but when this achievement is compared to the annual population growth rate and the concomitant increasing demand for safe drinking water the rate at which the supply coverage has been found inadequate. This is mainly due to the relatively capital intensive nature of both urban and rural water supply schemes, the previous inadequate strategy, increased leakage in urban areas, and other related reasons. Currently progresses have been made in implementing cost recovery, decreasing leakage in urban areas and strengthening the family and community approach by giving technical and material assistances to upgrade schemes developed by them. To further improve the trend family and community level development approach should get more attention from all stakeholders. The enormity of the need of this sub-sector demands increased involvement of the community, donors, and all other stakeholders.