The Water ChangeMaker Awards are in the final stage of judging. From 350 initial submissions, there are 12 finalists. The winners will be presented during the virtual Climate Adaptation Summit on 25 January 2021. Here we recognise the top five countries where GWP partnerships mobilised the most Award submissions: China, India, Kenya, South Africa, and Uzbekistan.

Global Water Partnership (GWP)’s Africa Coordination Unit hosted the first Transboundary Water Governance Lab online event on the 18th November, with the purpose of assessing interest in the establishment of an International Water Law Community of Practice (CoP). The event was attended by alumni and partners of the Pan-African Water Governance and International Water Law, which has taken place annually since 2015.

Edit 14 December: Please note that the submission deadline for these internships has expired on 13 December 2020. Thank you to all who have applied, interviews will be set up shortly - for any questions, please reach out to us on internship@gwp.org.

The ad-hoc Steering Committee for the Nexus activities in the Drina River Basin under the SEE Nexus Project, supported by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA), had its first online meeting on 15 October 2020. Representatives from the Ministries of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia relevant to the water, energy and environment sectors, were informed about and commented on the project’s objectives and planned activities in the basin.

On 27 October, Global Water Partnership and Wuhan International Water Law Academy organised an online engagement session based on the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Governance for Transboundary Freshwater Security. The topic was ‘Does the world need more International Water Law?’ The event attracted approximately 100 participants. “One of the most encouraging feedback was a participant who realized ‘we don’t need to be lawyers to work with international water law.’ We tend to think that it is always lawyers who exercise the law, but the law is there to be exercised by anyone,” said GWP’s Yumiko Yasuda after the event.

Coordinated by GWP Eastern Africa and implemented by the Sahara and Sahel Observatory, $13, 079,540 from the Adaptation Fund will go towards strengthening smallholder farmers’ and pastoralists’ resilience to the adverse effects of drought in the IGAD region.

To assess progress made in transboundary water cooperation in Cameroon, the Ministry of Water Resources and Energy in collaboration with UNESCO Regional Office for Central Africa and GWP Cameroon organized a two day multi-stakeholder consultation workshop in Mbalmayo, Cameroon from the 3 - 4 September 2020.

The Lake Ohrid Watershed Management Plan was presented and discussed with representatives from all related authorities of North Macedonia marking another step towards its official adoption.

Youth from the Ghar El Melh wetland area continued their journey towards the development of their green entrepreneurship ideas into concrete actionable business plans, with the assistance of GWP-Med and WWF-North Africa.