Margaret Catley Carlson who was the Chair and the Patron of GWP visited GWP China Secretariat and its Host Institute, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR) on May 16, 2015, in Beijing.
The Chair of GWP WAf, Pr. Abel AFOUDA had a working visit at the Secretariat from October 19 to 24, 2015. During his stay on Ouagadougou, the Chair met with the staff to have an update on the implementation of various activities and give his orientations for finalizing pending issues.
He was presented the templates for the monitoring and drafting of the work plans, the draft progress reports of the CORE and the three projects bein implemented (WACDEP, IDMP and Mekrou), the guidelines for elaborating the budgets lines for 2016. On all these Prof. AFOUDA gave some orientations. The decision was also taken to convene the virtual meeting of the Steering Committee to appreciate the various documents and give orientations to the Secretariat. This meeting will be done early in November 2015.
Reflection workshop on « Sustainable livelihoods in wetlands in developing countries: the vision of the African youth” initiated by Water For Life Cameroon within the context of the celebration of World Wetlands Day and in partnership with GWP-CAf was held on February 3rd, 2016 in Yaoundé, Cameroun.
21 Participants drawn from 13 Cameroon youth led-organizations working for the protection of environment and research centers attended the workshop on wetlands.
The objective of the workshop was to raise awareness on the position of youth on the importance of the interdependence between human livelihoods and wetlands in urban and rural areas in order to catalyze change in the utilization of resources offered/generated by the wetlands.
Responding to the dramatic increase in extreme weather events and mega disasters is one of the great challenges of the Limpopo River Basin. Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) is a top priority for the basin as it seeks to hold back the tide of rising economic and human losses through flood and droughts. To reduce risks from such disasters, GWPSA has over the past 2 years been involved in the development of a disaster risk reduction action plan for the Limpopo Basin. This Plan of Action presents a strategy for integrating disaster risk reduction into the Limpopo transboundary level operations. As part of the process to developing the plan, GWPSA held a workshop on the 5th of April, 2016, to validate the draft DRR action plan of the Limpopo Basin.
At the SADC Water Week in Mozambique held from 20-22 May, 2015, stakeholders discussed the challenging aspects of managing water resources in the country in view of Mozambique sharing a number of river basins with its neighbours. For instance, the supply of water for the river basins located in the southern part of the country is heavily dependent on the Basins of international rivers. The solution to this challenge was seen in Mozambique requiring to always adapt an integrated water resources management approach and having long-term cooperative arrangements with its neighbours to avoid water availability being a constraint on future growth.
The elaboration of the study on the "Identification of development priorities in the Mékrou transboundary basin" in each country (Benin, Burkina and Niger) with workshops for the restitution and validation has been delayed because of some practical issues. The contracts were signed with some delay with each consultants and some national issues linked to the political and social situation couldn’t allow work to go on correctly.
A scanned version of the Framework Agreement signed on December 21, 2015 by Benin, Burkina and Niger was transmitted to all members of the Advisory Committee, to the nine (9) Ministers related to NBA through the National Focal Structures of NBA, as well to the Regional Coordination of users of the natural resources of the Niger basin (CRU-ABN).
GWP-Med, representing on occasion also GWP, has been contributing to the OECD Water Governance Initiative (WGI)[1] since its launch in 2013. In this framework, GWP-Med participated in the 7th meeting of the WGI held on 23-24 June 2016, in The Hague, the Netherlands. The meeting brought together some 80 representatives of organizations and institutions, members to the Initiative.