My name is Celine Pole Sikulisimwa, a Congolese senior lecturer at the University of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. My field of specialization is water science and technology.
The Limpopo River Basin (LRB) which has a total population of 18 million with 15 million in South Africa, 1.2 in Botswana, 1.1 million people in Mozambique, 0.8 million in Zimbabwe is prone to natural disasters as a result of climate change. Therefore, on the 24th of November, 2015, Resilience in the Limpopo Basin Program (RESILIM) in partnership with Global Water Partnership Southern Africa (GWP SA) undertook an in-country consultation workshop on the development of the Limpopo River Basin Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) Action Plan.
How to integrate drought management into the planning and development of River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs).
On March 3, 2015, the Workshop on Stories to Watch 2015 was held in Tsinghua University in Beijing which was jointly organized by the World Resources Institute (WRI) China and the Institute for Contemporary China Studies at Tsinghua University. Mr. Rugang Zheng, the Coordinator of GWP China was invited to attend the workshop.
One of the key IDMP actions in West Africa is the establishment of the national platforms in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger and at regional level. These platforms will be used to discuss issues related to the integrated drought management. In Niger a meeting held on November 5 to set up the national platform on Integrated Drought Management (GIS) in the country. The finalization of the project document for the institutional framework of PGIS Niger was also discussed.
A field trip to the Secretariat of the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR) as well as to water management national institutions in selected Danube Riparian countries - Austria, Slovakia and Hungary – that are active in the framework of the ICPDR, was organized on 8-10 October 2014.
Right at the heart of Namibia, “the land of the brave”, in the capital Windhoek was the venue for the 7th SADC Multi- stakeholder Water Dialogue held from the 29th to the 30th of September, 2015. Held under the theme, “Watering Development in SADC: The central role of water in driving industrialization” the dialogue was attended by 150 delegates from across the region representing the water sector, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), cooperating and development partners, academia, the media, and other relevant stakeholders from non-water entities (energy, agriculture, industrialization). The delegates, of which a good number were youth were brought together to deliberate the role that water will play in driving industrialization in the region.
Global Water Partnership Eastern Africa ( GWPEA)needs to develop a resource mobilization strategy and action plan due to the shift in responsibility for resource mobilization from global to regional and countries. More focus to leverage resource has been shifted to country level while the CWPs do not have capacities. GWP’s role needs to be very visible to development partners and show actual investment on the ground.