The rural population of Eastern Region has water coverage of 56.00% and sanitation coverage of 11.3% as at the end of December 2019. It is one of the regions with the least coverage in terms of safe water supply to rural areas in Ghana. In spite of past interventions since 1994, efforts to increase access to safe water in the region have been limited by many problems.

These problems include:

• Low investments in the WASH sector in the region.
• The large rural population has made the few investments have little impact on the overall coverage.
• Low ground water potential in some areas leading to low success rate of drilling,
• Water quality challenges in some communities.
• High poverty levels in communities that affect their capacity for fund mobilization and facility management at community level.

A sizeable number of communities now have large populations which require that their water facilities be upgraded from boreholes with hand pumps (point sources) to piped schemes since the number of available point sources in these communities have been outstripped by the current population levels, thereby impacting negatively on water coverage.