Groundwater is one of the very precious natural resource of earth that sustains all humanrnactivities. It is essential not only for sustenance of the human life but also for therneconomic and social progress of a region. Integration of remote sensing data and therngeographical information system (GIS) for the exploration of groundwater resources hasrnbecome a advance in the field of groundwater research, which assists in assessing,rnmonitoring, and conserving groundwater resources. Present paper is an attempt torndelineate groundwater potential zone in Dire dawa rivers catchment, eastern Ethiopiarnusing integrated approach of remote sensing and GIS techniques. The Ethiopia geologicalrnsurvey of NC 37-12 and NC 38-9 Geological map, Landsat (2011), SRTM, FAO soilrndata and Meteorological data are used to prepare various thematic layers such asrnlithology, slope, land-use, lineament, drainage, soil, rainfall, geomorphology and waterrnlevel depth maps. They were transformed to raster data using feature to raster converterrntool in ArcGIS and again to IDRISI raster for weight calculation. Digital imagernprocessing of Landsat ETM+ was carryout and interpreted to produce thematic map ofrnland use/cover in ERDAS Imagine. Lithology and lineaments for lineament density wererndigitized from geological map. Contours for elevation, drainage lines for drainagerndensity, slope and geomorphology were prepared from SRTM and soil map from FAOrn(the Digital Soil and Terrain Database). The rainfall map and depth to water level arerninterpolated from point data. Multi-criteria evaluation technique is used to integrate allrnthe thematic layers. Individual themes and their corresponding categories are assigned arnknowledge base ranking depending on their suitability to hold groundwater and theirrnweights are calculated. Using weighed overly analysis in Arc GIS software; all thematicrnmaps are integrated to produce a composite groundwater potential map of the study area.rnThis map was further classified into five categories which represents Very poor to Veryrnpotential zones. The result indicated that large part of the study area is classified underrngood category and the groundwater potential of the study area is related mainly torngeology, geomorphology, slope and lineaments. Spatially the very good and goodrncategories are distributed along plain geomorphic units, near to lineaments, less denserndrainage density and where the lithology is affected by secondary structure and havingrninterconnected pore spaces. The validity of the model was checked against borehole, dugrnwell, spring data distribution and bore hole yield which reflects the actual groundwaterrnpotential of the area; where out of 90 borehole data collected, 81 are on very good andrngood zones, 9 on moderate zones. From all of 27 dug wells and 23 springs covering thernentire catchment area, 22 and 11 of them are located in very good and good groundwaterrnpotential zone and the other 5 and 12 are in the moderate and poor zone respectively.rnMoreover out of 47 bore holes with yield between 0.4-10l/s, 41 bore holes are on the veryrngood and good zones and 3 on moderate zone; out of 14 bore holes with yield betweenrn10-20l/s all of them are in very good and good zone and from 18 bore holes with yieldrnbetween 20-60l/s 13 are in very good and good zone. Even though, dug wells exist in allrngroundwater potential zones, the best yielding wells lie in the very good and goodrngroundwater prospect zone.