Good practices in Basin Management
Assessment of the experiences of five African organizations
The document “Assessment of the expe-
riences of transboundary basin organi-
zations - Good practices and recommen-
dations”, coordinated by IOWater, was
presented and discussed at an exchange
workshop, held in Ouagadougou (Bur-
kina Faso) in November 2013.
The partner institutions involved are the basin
organizations of the Senegal (OMVS), Niger
(NBA), Congo (CICOS) and Volta Rivers (BVA)
and the Water Resources Coordination Center
(WRCC) of the Economic Community of West
African States (ECOWAS).
The assessment is built around practices rela-
ted to four key topics:
l
Governance;
l
Search for autonomous and sustainable
financing;
l
Strategic planning and implementation
actions;
l
Optimization of monitoring.
The workshop gathered the concerned organi-
zations,
the French Development Agency
(AFD),
which finances projects in these orga-
nizations,
the African Network of Basin
Organizations (ANBO)
and
IOWater.
The objective was to exchange and capitalize
on best practices based on the assessment
document, which was amended at the end of
the meeting.
An electronic forum on monitoring was also
held in September 2012.
Finally, many documents relating to the four
topics will be available soon on
the African
Water Information System (AWIS) web-
site.
4
10
The News N° 24 - March 2014
FRom one conTinenT To anoTHeR
AFRICA
The “Strengthening Institutions for
Transboundary Water Management in
Africa” (SITWA) project
aims to strengthen
regional cooperation at the political, econo-
mic and stakeholder level for sustainable ma-
nagement of transboundary water resources
in Africa contributing to peace and security,
stability and poverty alleviation.
This Project, financed by the European Union
and implemented by the Global Water
Partnership (GWPO) with ANBO Technical
Secretariat taken care of by the Organiza-
tion for the Development of the Senegal
River (OMVS), is organized in two phases:
an inception phase and an implementation
phase which will start in 2014 for the capa-
city building of African River Basin Organiza-
tions.
During the inception phase,
OIWater
and
INBO
experts were called to assess the needs
and identify priority actions for SITWA/ANBO
support services in relation with Information,
Knowledge management and Communication.
The final results of this study were presented
during a validation workshop organized in
Addis Abeba in October 2013.
After a description of the services which could
be provided by the SITWA/ANBO project in
relation with “Knowledge management”, a
global action plan related to this topic was
proposed and adopted by the project mana-
gement team, and then latter included in the
program validated by the Steering Committee
of the SITWA project.
Thus, the following main actions related to
“data and knowledge management”
are
planned to be implemented in the coming
years with the support of the SITWA project:
l
Development of
the African Water In-
formation System (AWIS)
web plat-
form;
l
Definition of the main procedures for me-
tadata, data and information exchanges;
l
Production of information outputs at pan
African and regional level;
l
Strengthening of the tools and proce-
dures for data exchange and information
systems in two selected pilot transboun-
dary basins, in collaboration with the
concerned Regional Economic Commis-
sions (RECs).
4
SITWA
For better knowledge management
Work meeting in Brazzaville in June 2013
