Abstract:
Urban water supply and consumption challenges are the widespread problems in most of the developing
countries such as Ethiopia. The main focus of the present paper was to assess the challenges of water supply
and consumption system in case of Wacha town of South Nation Nationalities People Region, Ethiopia. Mixed
survey design was employed to identify the root of the challenges and find the scientific solutions or sugges tion to tackle and overcome. Systematic random sampling was used to select household respondents, while
purposive sampling was attended for interviewing the key personnel’s. The survey work involved collection
of feedback in the form of questionnaires from 125Nos town household respondents,interviewing and group
discussions. The results of the study indicated that, insufficient water source and poor distribution of water
infrastructure, lack of technological capacity, Weak sectorial coordination, insufficient financial resource,
and shortage of efficient manpower are some of the main undermining root causes. Therefore, taking these
challenges into consideration, it was suggested that providing alternative water sources, active involvement
of the communities and participation of different actors and other sustainable approaches would prove to be
an effective and efficient adaptive measures.though the supplied water among the households was not suffi cient, the majority of the household were travel long distance to collect a jar of water and the consumption
of water is high. Most of the householdswere vulnerable to different problems due to the insufficientwater
supply. The local communities use different adaptation strategies (river, borehole, purchaing from privates
and fetching water from canals) in their local area in order to rehabilitate their insufficient water supply.
