The Botswana Country Water Partnership (BCWP) was launched in October 2003 as a chapter of GWP-SA. The Partnership was established with a mission to promote collaboration and sustainable utilization and management of water resources in Botswana through exchange of knowledge, experience and the practice of IWRM.
There have been many dialogues and seminars on river pollution in the past 20 years or so. Generally everyone agrees that as a country, we desperately need to do something about the sad state of our rivers, especially when we hope to achieve developed nation status by 2020. However, we have not been successful in translating consensus at these forums into changes on the ground.
Global Water Partnership-Caribbean (GWP-C) with the support of its partner, the Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies (CERMES) of The University of the West Indies (UWI) Cave Hill Campus in Barbados, spearheaded the first-ever Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) Knowledge Management Workshop to be held in the Caribbean.
More than twenty (20) stakeholders in St. Lucia from Ministries of Public Utilities and Finance and other government agencies, the private sector, non-governmental organisations, water and wastewater managers, legal practitioners, among others were trained in the area of Water Financing in a workshop held in St. Lucia on May 28th and 29th, 2013 put on by the Global Water Partnership-Caribbean (GWP-C) and the National Water and Sewerage Commission (NWSC) of St. Lucia.
“An integrated approach to managing and developing the world’s water resources is vital for not only driving world economies, ensuring human well-being and security from hunger, but can also serve as an essential building block for enhancing coherence on adaptation,” said Dr. Ursula Schaefer-Preuss, Chair of GWP at a side event at the Bonn climate change negotiations. “Water is the connecting link because climate impacts are largely felt through the medium of water,” she said.
Every three years since 1997, the World Water Forum, organised by the World Water Council, is one of the main international platforms for discussions about water.
“Media is our strategic partner—without it, we expect low levels of awareness, and slow change in water unfriendly practices and policies-”