Search

GWP, together with the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the African Ministers' Council on Water (AMCOW), opened a high-level discussion on how financing water security can accelerate delivery on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The event, the first in a series of discussions on ‘financing SDG 6’, took place in Stockholm on 29 August.

The water awards is the last initiative of the Country Water Partnership (CWP) of Burkina Faso. The aim of the Water and Sanitation Awards is to enable the identification of relevant actions in the water and sanitation sector, in order to acknowledge and honor the efforts of individuals and legal entities which are either at the base or contributed to the achievement of these actions. The ambition is to give visibility and promote water and sanitation as central to sustainable development in the country.

Sustainable management of any physical resource requires a good understanding of the distribution and quantities of that resource. Thus, information is highly valuable but it can be complex and hard to manage. Integrated management approaches in particular require massive amounts of spatially and temporally varying data from many different sectors: the quality and quantity of water resources; the geography of the area; the local geology and soil; the human communities; and the land use patterns is all important and interrelated information. One of the biggest challenges in IWRM today is to represent the full scope of this information, of the variables, interactions, and complexity that every water project and policy is confronted with. Analytical tools are needed to interpret the data in a way that makes it usable for decision makers. Models and Decision Support Systems (DSS) do exactly that.

A GWP delegation including the Coordinator, the Project manager and by the chair met with the Niger Basin Authority (NBA) Executive Secretary and some her colleagues on May 10, 2016. The discussions focused on how to start the implementation of the framework agreement for the promotion of political dialogue in the Mékrou tranboundary river basin signed in December 2015 by the three countries. To start with it was sugggested that the issue be included in the agenda of the next NBA council of ministers.

Global Water Partnership (GWP) Africa undertook an inception mission in Madagascar to support the design of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) work on Climate resilience mainstreaming into the water sector and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) services in the country aligning it to the country National Adaptation Planning process.

The period between 2011 and 2016 saw Global Water Partnership Africa Coordination Unit (GWP –CU) mobilising Euro 19.5 million for water security and climate resilience development in Africa through the Water, Climate and Development Programme (WACDEP).

Final preparations are underway for Stockholm World Water Week 2016, which this year takes place 28 August – 2 September. Similar to previous years, GWP has a prominent role at the event, with representatives involved in a number of sessions. Here are some highlights.

There is a challenge in convincing national and international leaders of the water sectors vulnerability to climate change.

Water is a precious gift from God, which is vital for life of the human race and the continuous existence of the functions in the ecosystem. Therefore, water shall be a public asset that shall be managed through participative approaches.