Onewash Project, Ethiopia

Our largest ever Cosmos roll-out

Ethiopia’s National Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) Inventory saw Cosmos rolled out on 4,000 tablets across Ethiopia in its biggest deployment yet.

The test of the platform and the logistics associated with the National WaSH Inventory (NWI) was carried out in Dire Dawa on 8-9 November 2014, and saw more than 40 of the field enumerators trained on the Cosmos platform and pre-set survey, before visiting a field location to carry out a practical test.

OneWaSH Technical Services Manager, Abera Endeshaw, who carried out the training, said that the pilot gave them a lot of valuable knowledge.

“The training on Cosmos has gone very well and the enumerators have picked up how to use the platform very quickly.

“The pilot has highlighted a number of areas, including logistics and community awareness and preparedness for the survey, that we can now go away and prepare for. In particular, it showed us how important it is for us to make sure the WaSH committees in the communities that are being surveyed, are ready to be able to answer the survey.”

“Next, we will take all these valid comments and contributions and discuss them with Ministry staff and will feed them into the plan for the next rolling out exercise.”

Cosmos was subsequently loaded on to almost 4,000 specially ruggedised tablets to allow the survey to take place on a scale and with sophistication that is unprecedented in the region. The digital inventory eliminated many of the issues that affected the first paper-based National WaSH Inventory, which took place in 2011. Surveys were consistent across the country and the digital collection platform ensured that inputs were accurate, while Cosmos’s GPS tagging facility greatly reduced opportunities for falsification.

The survey is part of the OneWaSH National Programme, which Tetra Tech worked on with the Government of Ethiopia, with funding from the UK government, African Development Bank, UNICEF and the World Bank.