The overall goal of the project is to build the resilience of ecosystems and economies that are most vulnerable to climate change induced water stress in the Nile Basin countries through building key adaptive capacity and piloting adaptation in “hotspots” with technical, policy and financial interventions.The project is in its third year, and will be closed by November 2012.
GWP Eastern Africa is involved in work package 2 of the project, i.e. institutional and policy support to countries. Work package 2 is one of 4 work packages in the first phase of the project ‘Adapting to Climate Change Induced Water Stress in the Nile Basin’.
Work package 2, within the timeframe and budget provided, will focus on outcome 3 of the project: To increase the technical capacity of regional/national centres of excellence and research centres to support the adaptation action of governments and communities.
Both technical and institutional capacity will be supported through meetings, workshops and also training/communication materials.
The GWP-led component seeks to engage as follows:
- Government departments, as the responsible agencies with institutional mandate and capacity to implement major actions at all dimensions- from policy to project- as well as informing sector development planning and budget;
- Research institutions, which have capacity to analyze the technical (and policy) outputs from this project and propose if and how they fit with existing knowledge, data and approaches at the country level;
- Civil society, donor organizations and media. If well informed they provide important driving forces for change;
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UN agencies, CGIAR and bilateral programs at country level. They have deeper capacity and parallel projects that might benefit from knowledge exchange with the project.
Progress on GWP component
1.Nile Technical Advisory Committee endorses project investment at country level. In July 2011 at the Nile Council of Ministers/ Nile TAC Meetings, GWP introduced the project and its requirements. NileTAC is the principal technical agency through which the project and the extensive activities and project outputs from the work packages will be introduced to the countries.
2.Country Water Partnerships representatives in Eastern Africa met together during a workshop which was organized by GWP Eastern Africa for key representatives of Country Water Partnerships who will disseminate the products of the Nile climate resilience project. These country representatives were involved in preparation of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) plans at national level, and understand the necessity as well as challenges for facilitating multi-stakeholder processes in discussion with the governmental unit for climate change.
Next steps
Two capacity-building workshops and two high level round tables will be organized by GWP Eastern Africa in 2012 as follows:
- Capacity building workshop, that will bring together an expanded number of technical officers from government, civil society, research institutions and multilateral agencies to discuss the outputs from the ‘Adapting to Climate Change Induced Water Stress in the Nile Basin’ project and define its absorption into national climate strategies and programs, as well as discuss how to inform the high level roundtables with implications of the outputs, recommendations and findings (March 2011);
- High level roundtable involving decision makers and top ministry officers, donors and climate negotiators (May 2011);
- Second capacity building workshop to consider the final outputs from the project components vis-a-vis planning and information for climate resilience at country level;
- Final high level roundtable to discuss and adopt/adapt the recommendations of the project report.