Water is a vital resource to meet basic human needs, and for all socio-economic development. Water scarcity is mainly reinforced by climate change, population pressure and deprived management of resources. Rainwater harvesting is one of the promising solutions to water scarcity. The study area experiences drought and the increment of pressure on water resources due to the aggravation of domestic, livestock and agricultural water demand and improper management of the available water resources. To address this problem proper planning and management of water resources is very crucial. The aim of this research was to identify potential rainwater harvesting (RWH) sites in Wag-Himra zone, to tackle the acute water scarcity problem. Geographic information system (GIS) with multi-criteria evaluation system used to identify potential RWH sites by integrating five criteria those are; land use/cover, soil, runoff depth, slop, drainage density and town and road were considered as a restricted area/constraint. Land use/cover map was prepared from landsat8 (30m resolution). Land use/cover was classified by supervised image classification (maximum likely hood) with an accuracy of 76.2%. The soil conservation service-curve number (SCS-CN) model was used to estimate the runoff depth. The suitable sites of rainwater harvesting (RWH) map were prepared by weighted overlay analysis, by assigning weight for each factor. The weight of the criteria was made by using the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) based on hydrological and socio-economic characteristics of the study area and available literature. The potential location of rainwater harvesting structures (Farm Pond and Check Dam) were selected based on the Integrated Mission for Sustainable development (IMSD) guideline. The research result showed that, the RWH site was grouped in to five suitability levels which is from the total of 9004km 2 , only 0.02% of the area was rated as highly suitable, 2.59%, 12.26%, 61.76%, and 21.1% of the area was leveled as moderately suitable, marginally suitable, less suitable, and not suitable for RWH respectively. Only 2.29% of the study area was considered as a constraint. The finding of this research will guide decision-makers, water resource planners and inform them RWH is an alternative source of water for domestic, livestock, industries and agriculture. The potential sites were identified using remote sensing data and the result can be compromised due to the spatial resolution of the image, therefore detailed investigation need to be taken during the implementation of rainwater harvesting interventions.