Achieving sustainable operation, maintenance and management of water supply still poses major challenges in rural areas of East Darfur State, despite the progress achieved in terms of the construction of new facilities and/or rehabilitation of non-functional ones. The main objective of this study is to identify the socio-economic and technical barriers to sustain the operation and maintenance of the water yards in Bahar Al Arab and Asalaya localities. The findings will be used to design the approaches to problems of water yards’ operation and maintenance in ED. The study investigated the technical, socio-economic/cultural factors, water tariffs and policy factors influencing sustainability of water supply for rural communities in the pilot localities. Different tools and techniques were applied to collect quantitative and qualitative data from a sample size of 1400 HHs served by 28 boreholes, 5 focus group discussions with water management committees and users, 18 community meetings and 33 questionnaires targeting key informants. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS version 25.
The study findings show that there is a relationship between sustainable OM&M of water supply facilities and the technical, socio-economic, socio-cultural factors and water tariffs. The study has proved that the frequent breakdown of water facilities is largely because of poor maintenance culture. Another barrier is inadequate funds for O&M due to the way water tariff was set, collected and utilized. There was lack of involvement and participation of users in all process of water supply, which resulted in a lack of ownership and no role for users to support OM&M. Despite the fact that users are not involved in setting water tariffs, the study shows high level of users’ willing to pay for any service improvement. Technical factors were found to be limited due to lack of repairing tools like crane and inadequate technical capacity of the SWC maintenance teams at the locality level to deal with various aspects of water supply.