Access to safe drinking water remains to be a critical challenge in many rural areas that have been depending on the rainfall and other water catchment areas. This problem has attracted the attention to Government, Private sectors and NGOs. In an effort to deal with the perennial problem many NGOs have initiated interventions aimed at improving access to water. However, with all these efforts the issue of sustainability of these water projects remains to be a critical challenge that is attributed to community participation. Sustainability of donor funded development project has been viewed to be a major concern in the project management. Despite huge resources channeled towards these community water projects, the projects are not well sustained as planned owing to lack community involvement. This mainly focuses on the participatory planning approaches and sustainability of donor funded community water projects.