| Sumario: | This guideline provides a comprehensive planning framework for preventing and controlling water pollution in Ethiopia, with the Akaki Catchment as a case study. Water pollution is a growing national concern that threatens public health, reduces agricultural productivity, damages ecosystems, and creates heavy economic costs. In Ethiopia, it contributes to thousands of deaths annually, accelerates biodiversity loss and increases the burden of water treatment.
The central purpose of this guideline is to serve as a practical tool for preparing pollution prevention and control plans at the catchment scale. It is targeted at authorities that are involved in river pollution control at the catchment and city levels. Existing institutional efforts are fragmented, poorly coordinated, and often reactive rather than preventive. Without a unified plan at the catchment level, it is difficult to define the water quality goals society aspires to, or to judge whether current measures are sufficient. This framework enables authorities to assess existing efforts, identify gaps, and design the most cost-effective mix of additional solutions needed to achieve and maintain safe and sustainable water quality.
Beyond addressing immediate problems, the guideline seeks to harmonize pollution control initiatives across institutions, strengthen monitoring systems, and embed catchment-level planning as the standard approach. The Akaki Catchment is used as a demonstration case, but the methods and structure outlined in the guideline are designed for replication in other urban rivers across Ethiopia, making it a scalable national model.
Using the DPSIR (Drivers–Pressures–State–Impacts–Responses) framework, the guideline provides a structured way of analyzing water pollution. Rapid population growth, unregulated urbanization, industrial expansion, and weak infrastructure are identified as the main drivers. These drivers create pressures such as untreated sewage, industrial discharges, solid waste dumping, livestock waste, and agricultural runoff. The state of the river is therefore severely degraded, with high levels of pathogens and heavy metals, affecting people, livestock, and irrigated crops that rely on polluted water.
The impacts of these conditions are far-reaching. They spread waterborne diseases, contribute to antimicrobial resistance, lower crop productivity, increase treatment costs, and erode the ecological functions of rivers. The guideline highlights that only through a coordinated catchment-scale plan can these interconnected impacts be addressed systematically and sustainably.
The document also reviews international and national legal frameworks and maps ongoing initiatives, including the Addis Ababa Wastewater Master Plan, the Rivers and Riverside Development Program and the Awash Basin Strategic Plan. Although these initiatives are promising, they face limitations due to weak enforcement, inadequate coordination, and limited community participation. This further underlines the need for a catchment-based prevention and control plan that integrates different actors under a shared vision.
To overcome these barriers, the guideline proposes a coordinated action plan with clear roles and responsibilities, well-defined accountability measures, and effective monitoring mechanisms to track progress at the catchment level.
If implemented effectively, this plan will not only reduce pollution and protect public health but also restore the ecological integrity of the Akaki River and support efficient agricultural and livestock value chains. More importantly, it will establish a model for comprehensive, catchment-scale pollution prevention and control planning that can be applied to other river basins across Ethiopia, supporting long-term sustainability and national development goals.
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