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Establishing strong partnerships is key to delivering GWP strategy and the implementation of programmes, says Mr Alex Simalabwi Global Water Partnership Southern Africa Executive Secretary and Head Africa Coordination Unit.

GWP and AMCOW – the African Ministers’ Council on Water – have been working together for over a decade. AMCOW Executive Secretary Dr Canisius Kanangire recently visited the GWP secretariat in Stockholm to discuss current and future collaboration. Dr Kanangire says that GWP has a lot of knowledge, experience, and expertise that can support AMCOW to reach results in many aspects of water resources management.

In Shaanxi Province, groundwater is the main source of water for drinking and irrigating crops. It is also vital for sustaining ecosystems such as streams, lakes, and wetlands. But this resource is coming under pressure due to population growth, urbanisation and changing land use, and climate change. GWP China Shaanxi conducted a series of studies to analyse the role of groundwater in water resources allocation. These led to a proposal to establish legislation and provided policy recommendations to decision-makers to strengthen the management of groundwater.

Drought in the central American region is characterized by a variation in rainfall distribution, manifested by a few rainy events among long periods without rainfall within the rainy season. This situation severely affects production cycles of agricultural producers, who heavily rely on rain-fed agriculture and lack adequate technology to face droughts; negatively influencing overall economic and social stability, and wellbeing. In the Honduran agricultural sector, drought mainly manifests itself through crop loss, reduced crop acreage and water supply problems in terms of both quantity and quality. The effects generated have significant impact on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is why this issue is very high up in the political agenda.

On 31 January 2019, the German, Czech and Slovak partners of Danube Floodplain project organized a one-day stakeholder consultation meeting held back-to-back with a workshop on ecosystem services. The event took place at the Research Institute of Water Management in Bratislava and brought together key stakeholders from Slovakia and Czech Republic, giving the project partners the opportunity to present and discuss Danube Floodplain project with stakeholders from various areas.

The annual GWP Network Meeting will be held on 11 October at 13.00 Central European Time (CET). It is a virtual meeting, to be broadcast on the GWP website www.gwp.org – with a special guest message from UN Deputy Secretary General (DSG) Jan Eliasson. A live session will be held in connection to this on GWP’s Facebook page – we welcome your questions and comments.

The meeting was held in Léo, Burkina Faso from 19 to 22 December 2017 to draw lessons from the implementation of the first phase (2015-2017) and plan for the second phase focus activities. Main regional partners (VBA, Ministry of Environment of Burkina, ECOWAS/WRCC, CILSS/AGRHYMET, IUCN, WASCAL, SOS Sahel International, WAEMU, 2IE, University of Ouaga 2, CWP Burkina Faso, CWP Mali and CWP Niger) gathered to make a participatory self-assessment of the implementation of the Integrated Drought Management Project in West Africa.

The CWP Guinea was visited by a team of consultant working on the evolutions in the Senegal basin transboundary environemental diagnosis analysis developed in 2006 and the need for revising it. The discussions included also how the CWP could play a more active role in the second phase of the IWRM programme (PGIRE) of OMVS, the present state of the Senegal basin, present trends of hydrological data in the basin, the environmental degradation and the Gender mainstreaming.

The Integrated Drought Management in West Africa (IDMP WA) Project Officer visited Torodi, Niger from 13 to 16 April 2016. She was accompanied by the Permanent Secretary of the Niger CWP and the person in charge of communication to visit the demonstration pilot site in Kankantouti, a village of the rural municipality of Torodi.

- Regional Chair - Steering Committee Members - Observer