April 7, 2026 – WRI has initiated a new project aimed at strengthening water security in Ethiopia’s Tana Subbasin. The area, which is part of the larger Abbay (Blue Nile) River Basin, supports over 3 million people and plays a critical role in regional agriculture, industry and rural livelihoods. The Protecting Water Supplies and Catchments in Ethiopia’s Tana Subbasin (ProTana) project builds on work since 2020 to promote sustainable water resources management, sound river basin administration and watershed protection in the region.
This new five-year project phase seeks to institutionalize stronger water governance processes and expand community-led watershed restoration across three woredas (districts) of the Amhara Region that overlap the Tana Subbasin: North Mecha, Farta and Dera. WRI will work in close collaboration with its implementing partners from civil society and government: WaterAid Ethiopia, ORDA Ethiopia, Millennium Water Alliance and the Abbay Basin Administration Office.
A project launch event on Feb. 17, 2026, brought together actors from water, energy, agriculture, environment, forestry, land administration and the cooperative commission. Ethiopia’s federal Ministry of Water and Energy was represented, in addition to government officials from both catchment and administrative-level offices, academic institutions, development practitioners, private sector representatives and community leaders, reflecting the collaborative ethos needed to strengthen water security across decision-making scales.
ProTana employs a “source-to-system” approach, linking water resources management (WRM), water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and climate resilience.
Made possible through financial support from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and The Coca-Cola Foundation, the initiative is rooted in a simple but urgent message: Sustainable water supplies and services rest on good governance and healthy watersheds.
A Basin at Risk
The Tana Subbasin is a critical water source area that spans more than 15,000 square kilometers and supports millions of people. It also sustains Ethiopia’s largest lake, Lake Tana, which some estimate to hold 50% of the country’s freshwater. The basin underpins important regional biodiversity, agricultural production, and local economic activities and livelihoods.
It is both an ecological engine and an economic backbone for the region.
Yet across the subbasin, water levels and quality are being threatened by expanding deforestation, land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate variability. Furthermore, persistent governance gaps challenge how water and other natural resources are managed across sectoral offices and at different administrative and spatial scales of authority. At the community level, many farmers lack sufficient knowledge and resources to apply sustainable land management measures, which is impacting local hydrology and soil health. Both natural and governance systems are strained by increasing demand for water and climate uncertainty.
The result is that water supplies are shrinking and becoming less reliable — especially for rural and more vulnerable communities. Research shows that deforestation and expanding cultivation at the expense of forests and grasslands have decreased baseflow and percolation in the basin between 1986 and 2010, impacting both surface and groundwater supplies.
A Systems Approach to Water Security
ProTana responds to these multi-faceted challenges by addressing the full water system — from protecting natural sources of freshwater to improving how water is planned, managed, delivered and monitored.
In so doing, the project aims to confront systemic issues that threaten water availability, access and service provision. The ultimate goal is to help secure sustainable water supplies and enhance the long-term resilience of the region’s water systems and communities.
Activities fall under three interconnected workstreams:
1) Data-driven decision-making and integrated governance
Water security depends on reliable data, effective decision-making institutions and coordinated planning that considers water as multi-sectoral and multi-scalar. Through this workstream, WRI aims to strengthen data and governance mechanisms to enable more informed, cross-sectoral decision-making at the woreda, regional and basin scales. This is expected to help officials better develop, manage and protect water resources.
By improving analytical and institutional tools, regulatory frameworks and collaborative planning processes, the project aims to help government agencies pivot more effectively from strategy development to implementation. By looking at both catchment and administrative overlaps, the project aims to advance broader capacity and collaboration linkages at these two critical spatial scales for hydrological governance.
WRI embraces Integrated Water Resources Management as a guiding principle in this work. The aim is not simply to produce more data, but to make data more actionable — to build institutions that can prioritize and respond to climate risks, manage demand, protect water quality and allocate water more equitably and sustainably.
2) Community-based watershed management
Degraded landscapes across the Tana Subbasin are impairing hydrological functions, reducing groundwater recharge, and increasing vulnerability to water scarcity, droughts and floods. ProTana seeks to address these challenges by restoring approximately 2,000 hectares of severely degraded micro-watersheds through community-led interventions. This is expected to help safeguard and replenish source waters and reduce pressures on the natural environment by improving local livelihood options. Workstream 2 embodies the project’s “on-the-ground” implementation element.
Building on results from the previous project phase in the Minzir 01 micro-watershed of North Mecha — where land restoration contributed to expanded vegetation cover and hydrological recovery — WRI and partners plan to replicate the project’s integrated model across additional sites in all three districts. We will work with government agents and local farming communities to restore degraded land while improving climate-resilient water safety planning so that source waters are better protected and local water systems are able to function consistently over time. We will advance a participatory approach that seeks to create lasting incentives for sustainable land and water management, addressing both ecological degradation and livelihood pressures. Through tree and seedling planting, soil and water conservation measures, and regenerative agricultural practices, the goal is to help improve water availability and quality, local wellbeing and livelihoods, and climate resilience.
3) Knowledge and learning for sectoral change at the intersection of WRM and WASH
Evidence on the water benefits of landscape restoration remains limited and lacks attention in the WASH sector. The third workstream focuses on generating evidence and lessons and using these to inform policy, programming and investment, such as drafting regulatory standards or developing outcome-based financing models. A robust monitoring, evaluation and learning framework will track both biophysical changes — such as vegetation cover, streamflow, volumes replenished and groundwater levels — and socio-economic outcomes, including on agricultural productivity and household wellbeing.
The project will also explore cost-effective ways to combine field data, remote sensing and geospatial technologies to better measure the hydrological benefits of landscape restoration. Findings will be shared through regional and national platforms to strengthen linkages between watershed protection, WRM and WASH programming.
By combining scientific rigor and community-level monitoring with in situ and remotely sensed measurements, ProTana aims to generate credible insights relevant for policy and practice. Ultimately, the idea is to use these insights to help shift the sector beyond infrastructure-focused solutions toward more integrated, climate-resilient water management that connects source water protection with water service delivery.
From Source to System
The Tana Subbasin’s many water challenges require multi-pronged solutions that can address the root causes of water insecurity while helping manage water-related climate risks. For WRI, these solutions are not just about new water development; they are also about improving the enabling environment and restoring health to local landscapes. By addressing multiple systemic challenges, such multi-dimensional interventions can help deliver benefits for household water, economic activities, livelihoods and the broader natural environment.
What makes ProTana distinct is its “source-to-system” model. It bridges freshwater conservation and WASH access. It connects institutional strengthening with on-the-ground action. It addresses ecological degradation and livelihood needs simultaneously. And it seeks to move from pilot interventions to replicable models that can inform efforts in other woredas and beyond.
Ultimately, the project is about resilience: ecological resilience, institutional resilience and community resilience. It is about ensuring that water systems can withstand climatic shocks, that governance systems can adapt to uncertainty, and that communities can have reliable, safe water supplies and services for the long run. With coordinated action, sustained commitment and the right incentives, such outcomes can be more effectively achieved.
WaterAid Ethiopia, ORDA Ethiopia, MWA, ABAO contributed to this article.
