The number of people worldwide experiencing water stress in their daily lives could double by 2050 to half of the global population (Munia et al., 2020). The impacts of water scarcity are especially felt in arid and semi-arid regions like northeastern Ethiopia, where rural populations rely primarily on groundwater for domestic needs, and livestock are a large source of household income. In 2017, only 11% of all Ethiopians had access to safely managed drinking water services, and 30% had access to basic services, while in rural areas, access to safely managed services decreases to 4.6% (UNICEF, 2017).

Afar, one of the 11 regional states in Ethiopia, is the focus of this research because the hot arid climate, lack of year-round surface water, and deep aquifers have made the region a focus of interventions by national and international development institutions - including the drilling of motorized boreholes to supply water to communities. The deep mechanized borehole schemes in the region are designed to reduce the dependence of communities on expensive water trucking operations during drought emergencies, which aligns with the federal government's Climate Resilient WASH initiative of the One WASH National Program (Butterworth et al., 2018).

Ninety percent of the population in Afar practices pastoralism, where communities raise livestock and herd animals over long distances to access water and grazing (Nassef and Belayhun, 2012). Pastoralists are unique water consumers, and water usage patterns in communities vary widely depending on livestock herd compositions, time of year, recent rainfall, and degree of villagization (Degefu et al., 2020). For decades, there has been misalignment between traditional clan-based water and grazing rights management by Afar pastoralists and the water institutions, namely community-based management of drilled boreholes, established by aid agency and non-governmental organization development interventions (Nassef and Belayhun, 2012; Alexander et al., 2015; Behailu et al., 2016).

Afar is also a site of protracted ethnic conflict. The conflict has often been viewed as a land dispute along the Afar/Somali Region border (OCHA, 2021). However, the causes of the continuation of the century-long violence can more readily be tied to cultural identity than land rights issues (Alemu, 2017). This self-perpetuating conflict substantially affects water security, as 29,000 people were recently displaced and fighting often forces people to move their settlements to areas with sub-optimal water access (OCHA, 2021).

A review on the relationships between water security and well-being found strong connections for physical and psychosocial health and human-environment interactions (Kangmennaang and Elliott, 2021). In addition, Ethiopian pastoralists face many risks due to climate change, including droughts, loss of human and animal life, damage from winds and floods, and reduced economic productivity (Chinasho et al., 2017). Experiencing water stress, violence, and deprivation create a triple-vulnerability among these already-marginalized populations, lowering their ability to cope with current and future setbacks like the increasing frequency and severity of climate impacts (Ebi and Bowen, 2016; Vins et al., 2015). Therefore, expanding climate-resilient water supply is an appropriate mitigation strategy, balanced with the consideration that over-concentration of water sources will encourage sedentarization and rangeland degradation in pastoralist regions (Cooper et al., 2019; Nassef and Belayhun, 2012).

In this study, high water security is classified when water users experience satisfaction around their ability to access water that is reliable, affordable, adequate, and safe, i.e., free from contamination (Jepson et al., 2017). Water security through quality water management and service delivery is associated with improved well-being and good health, but there is little empirical data on whether interventions to provide water supply have ongoing effects on water security, especially in challenging contexts (Miller et al., 2020).

We designed this study to test whether the installation of motorized boreholes in this context contribute to improved water security and emotional well-being. With an improved understanding of the drivers of household water insecurity and water-related emotional well-being or distress, water supply installations for pastoralist populations may be designed around an improved understanding of water users’ needs and wants (Whitley et al., 2019). Instead of the traditional infrastructure-first approach, we advocate for water security as a dynamic state where water users can “engage with and benefit from the sustained hydro-social processes that support water flows, water quality, and water services in support of human capabilities and well-being” after Jepson et al. (2017).