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“A lot is going on but we are not aware of it. We live in a small region but we don’t know what each other is doing in terms of teaching water resources management in universities,” was the key message of Professor Adrian Cashman from the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus at the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) Knowledge Sharing workshop in Barbados on June 5-6, 2013. 

The Tanzania Consultative Meeting on Water in the Post-2015 Agenda convened from 26 – 27 March 2013 at Ubungo Plaza in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It was co-led by the Tanzania Country Water Partnership.

The “Financing of sustainable water resources management and development: economics, financing opportunities and project preparation” is the focus of high-level regional training and knowledge exchange in Pretoria, South Africa from the 21st -24th July, 2014. 27 Delegates from African countries and River Basin Organisations working in the water are meeting to increase their knowledge and skills, to attract investors and financial development partners for both water governance and water infrastructure development.

The Maasai live in an area of Kenya that has no water in the rivers for half a year. To address the water scarcity, the Water for the Maasai project was initiated. In this project, the Maasai, the donor and the NGO work closely to cooperate in the key issues of education, training and long-term guidance. The key lesson is that it takes time to build trust among donors, NGOs and native populations. 

Water Supply and Sanitation policy in Vietnam is regulated through policy and a regulatory framework. However, the rural sanitation sector have had limited success and management has failed to be scaled up. To address these issues the Problem-Driven Governance and Political Economy Analysis Good Practice Framework was used to analyse the poor performance. The most important lesson is that not all policies are appropriate for scaling up.

Two of the regional ‘sister networks’, Global Water Partnership Southern Africa (GWP-SA) and WaterNet held a regional knowledge exchange workshop from the 12^th to 13^th of August 2014 at Protea Edward Hotel in Durban, South Africa. The workshop was aimed at strengthening the partnership between the two networks in knowledge management and professional capacity development. The workshop addressed three critical issues: providing an overview of GWP’s Knowledge Management strategic thrust and the GWP IWRM Toolbox; strengthening the GWP-SA and WaterNet partnership on ‘research for development’; and building on professional capacity development.

Representatives of GWP Kenya and GWP Ethiopia recently carried out an exchange visit to share experiences on water resources management practices.

A proper enabling environment establishes the rights and assets of all stakeholders (individuals as well as public and private sector organizations and companies, women as well as men, the poor as well as the better off), while ensuring for environmental quality. The enabling environment essentially consists of “rules of the game” that are laid out as to achieve a sustainable balance between the social, economic and environmental needs for water. These rules can be defined by the use of: (1) Policies; (2) Legislative Frameworks; and (3) Financing and Investment Structures.

A regional consultation workshop took place in Tunis, on September 11^th 2014, aimed at supporting the development of the ten-year strategy (2015-2025) and the detailed five-year action plan (2015-2020) for the African Network for Basin Organisations (ANBO) to become an effective tool in strengthening and promoting institutional management mechanisms for shared water resources in Africa.

Water Integrity Capacity Building for the Middle East and North Africa region is a four year (2014-2017) regional programme implemented by Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) in collaboration with GWP-Med and other regional and local partners.