Cooperation in International Waters in Africa: Annual Report FY2019
Water is the means through which the impacts of climate change are first felt. Variability in rainfall and water run-off are already affecting the continent of Africa through extremes – droughts and floods – as well as threatening a ‘new normal’ of drying cities, reduced hydroelectric power, and shorter growing seasons. Like water, climate change does not respect national boundaries, and international cooperation is necessary for assessing risks, anticipating extreme events, and developing and operating infrastructure, among other actions. For this reason, climate concerns have been built into CIWA from its launch and are deeply embedded in our sub-regional programs as well as our analytic work.
The CIWA-financed Niger Basin Climate Resilience Investment Plan (CRIP), adopted in November 2015, was developed by the Niger Basin countries to mobilize and coordinate investments in climate resilience. The CRIP pairs strategic climate change responses with development planning through the Knowledge and Institutions Package (54 actions) and the Sectoral Investment Package (192 actions). Each package consists of actions identified in Niger Basin countries’ national climate adaptation processes as well as regionally identified actions.
The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) provided training to all Eastern Nile riparian countries on several high-priority climate resilience issues including reservoir sedimentation, drought monitoring, flood forecasting, and preparedness. Current work is expanding the geographic implementation of the program as well as implementing drought forecasting. Their work has been featured in two discussion papers from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Building Resilience to Shocks and Protracted Crises in the Middle East and North Africa and Water Management in Fragile Systems: Building Resilience to Shocks and Protracted Crises in the Middle East and North Africa. The NBI work is a good example of how services such as flood forecasting can benefit all riparian countries while not requiring physical investment in all countries – especially useful when fragile or conflict-affected countries are involved.
At a more community-focused level, the Nile Basin Discourse (NBD) implemented multiple activities to provide training and seed funding for climate-resilient alternative livelihoods programs (some focused toward youth and women) in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. They also facilitated climate risk management capacity building across the Nile Basin.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is working to better understand transboundary aquifers in order to improve sustainable conjunctive use of the resource. The regionally-coordinated conjunctive use of surface and groundwater is key to managing the increasing variability that Southern Africa is facing. So far only three out of 30 aquifers have been comprehensively assessed in order to understand their full groundwater potential, especially at the transboundary level. Currently, through SADC’s Soil and Groundwater Management Plan, the Shire Transboundary River/Aquifer System project is under implementation. Now that the SADC Groundwater Management Institute is fully established, the pace of work has accelerated, and it will require additional funds to cover the key aquifers that are not yet properly studied.
The Volta River Basin program supported ratification of the regional Water Charter, and in so doing provided training to 180 civil society organizations (30 per country) involved in climate resilience and the environment, bringing together key strategic partners from the six countries. The Autorité du Bassin de la Volta (Volta Basin Authority; ABV) will continue implementation of the strategic communication plan through community and rural radio to increase awareness of climate change issues in the basin.
The Zambezi Basin Commission has developed the Zambezi Water Resources Information System (ZAMWIS) with CIWA support. ZAMWIS is a database, planning tool, and flow forecasting system implemented to support climate monitoring and climate-sensitive planning in the basin. Earth observation data is regularly downloaded, processed, and uploaded to the ZAMWIS Database and thereby shared with the riparian states. Data collected by individual riparian states is shared on a quarterly basis. Rules and Procedures for Sharing of Data and Information Related to the Management and Development of the Zambezi Watercourse have been developed to facilitate data sharing among riparian states.
Finally, CIWA recently published a report entitled Climate Resilience in Africa: The Role of Cooperation around Transboundary Waters. This documents the relationships between climate change, livelihoods, and water management across Sub-Saharan Africa. The report proposes a framework for cooperation and climate resilience that would help River Basin Organizations, riparian states, water management authorities, development partners, and other stakeholders formulate strategies to tackle transboundary water issues.
CIWA is a vital source of technical assistance, offering support to transboundary water institutions through policy advice, research and analysis, and technical assistance. The analytical work supported by CIWA often underpins financing and investments. CIWA supports capacity development in the institutions that we serve, and participates in many conferences hosted by the transboundary institutions that we support. When countries can find a common technical and scientific understanding, a door has opened for expanding cooperation and dialogue.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Groundwater Management Institute is providing a technical and scientific platform for exchange among SADC institutions, governments and service agencies. Studies, guidelines, manuals and trainings benefit a wide range of stakeholders in the region.
Through its Dam Safety Program, the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) worked with the Eastern Nile countries of Egypt, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sudan to build technical capacity and establish harmonized regional policy and safety norms. Through the program, these countries have participated in a series of hands-on dam safety workshops, developed regional and national training curricula, and created national dam safety units. Future work will include expanding these activities to the Nile Equatorial Lakes region and building a Regional Center of Dam Safety Excellence. Developing national technical capacity to utilize dam cascade planning, and using flood forecasting to support early warning systems, are other examples of cooperation in the Nile Basin built on scientific collaboration.
Likewise, the Zambezi Water Resources Information System (ZAMWIS) is currently being modernized and fully operationalized to provide an effective platform for data, information, and knowledge collection, assessment and sharing in the Zambezi River Basin. The improved ZAMWIS will include a Decision Support System for riparian transboundary development scenario analysis and tools for flow forecasting and monitoring. It will be part of the technology utilized to mitigate the impact of water shocks with operational collaboration among riparian states, including such mechanisms as dam synchronization, flood and drought early warning systems, and coordination between riparian state disaster management structures.
Through the activities implemented by the projects, training on technical issues, and stakeholder forums, CIWA has provided opportunities for riparian states to come together on technical and scientific grounds. While as a society we have not realized the full advantages of water resource management transboundary cooperation, CIWA has helped to set the stage where countries can agree on their individual advantages and disadvantages in investment prioritization through a lens of commonly recognized and transparent information.
CIWA recognizes women’s and girls’ unequal access to water resources, their unequal participation in water management processes, and the unequal burden they shoulder from water-related development and climate challenges. To mitigate these inequalities CIWA facilitates the inclusion of nongovernmental organizations, civil society organizations, and other organizations representing the interests and rights of women in stakeholder advisory groups, dialogues with civil society, and stakeholder research, and makes major efforts to improve bottom-up and horizontal communication among civil society organisations.
Communications materials, information portals, and knowledge partnerships developed with CIWA support are informed by the gender-differentiated reality of climate risks and vulnerability that men and women face and the leadership roles women play in building climate change resilience. The Autorité du Bassin de la Volta (Volta Basin Authority; ABV) finalized its Communications Strategy and Plan, which consulted at least 500 people, including civil society organizations specifically representing women’s interests. Implementation through the community and rural radio outreach began in July 2019 to increase local stakeholder awareness.
Women’s water use priorities are sometimes in competition among water users and are therefore considered explicitly in planning and implementation of development processes to ensure equitable benefit sharing. To this end, CIWA-supported work with water commissions, water juries, irrigation cooperatives, and women’s organizations plays an important role in helping resolve water-related disputes among local stakeholders.
In the Zambezi Basin, the Zambezi Watercourse Commission approved a Gender Mainstreaming Strategy and Implementation Plan (November, 2018) which was harmonized with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) system-wide policy on gender equality. This gender strategy outlines five strategic objectives and priority measures that are being used to enhance gender mainstreaming in three areas of intervention: structural, personnel, and outputs. The Zambezi Watercourse Strategic Plan Report (February, 2019) also acknowledges the gender mainstreaming aspects of the project’s livelihood support activities in marginalized communities. SADC’s own gender mainstreaming framework was ratified by member states in 2015. In 2019, SADC’s cumulative female direct beneficiary number reached 9,150 women (58% of the total direct beneficiaries).
The Nile Basin Discourse (NBD) has specifically worked to enhance the knowledge and skills of women and youth in climate resilience and involve them in investment planning activities in the Nile Basin. Gender and youth engagements helped grassroot community leaders to overcome barriers and agree to equitable benefits from the Lakes Edward and Albert Fisheries and Water Resources Management Project II. At the Bara Akobo Sobat investment, the NBD orchestrated community dialogues that were key to allowing contractors access to the site and facilitated cooperation between Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) consultants and local communities. The NBD also leveraged seed funding from Coca Cola and the IHE Delft program to target women participants in climate-resilient livelihoods training.
Systematic gender mainstreaming policies and strategies are now actively being implemented in CIWA-supported basin authorities, and we expect to see enhanced hiring of women into high positions over the coming years. Efforts to obtain gender parity in training and events still fall short; however, activities like the NBI Young Professional Program target the recruitment of women and have attracted female engineers from many partner countries. Future movement toward parity will hopefully build as local women achieve greater access to tertiary education and professional degrees.
A year ago, CIWA committed to deepening its engagement in fragile and conflict-affected situations. The need was described in the 2018 Annual Report:
In this 2019 Annual Report, we discuss the progress made toward this commitment, particularly in the Horn of Africa.
In 2018, the CIWA Advisory Committee also agreed on the need to extend the program’s initial 2011–21 timeframe, and CIWA has now been extended to 2026. This extension, coupled with additional financial contributions, suggests confidence in the CIWA Program’s design and performance. But more importantly, it also shows a shared understanding of the importance of transboundary waters to Africa’s socio-economic future, and that progress is neither automatic nor simple.
As this Annual Report discusses, planned support does not always progress smoothly or quickly. The underlying design of CIWA – enabling long-term ‘all-weather’ support to priority engagements; highly flexible ‘opportunistic’ engagements when the political stars align; and regional analytic and technical assistance work – has proved robust. But there is also a clear need to continue to innovate around the approaches we use to ensure that the resources CIWA has are turned into results as efficiently as possible.
One way that CIWA is exploring this is by helping connect clients to innovative ways to utilize new technologies to measure and manage water. The pace of technical and analytic innovation across the world is impressive, but the gap between the potential of such approaches and the actual practice of them is only growing. CIWA is focusing on how we might facilitate more ‘wholesale’ and regional approaches to connecting clients to such innovation, including working together with partners such as the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD), the African Ministers Council on Water (AMCOW), and the African Network of Basin Organizations (ANBO).
We are deeply grateful to our donors for their commitment to these approaches.
William Rex, CIWA Program Manager
The US$2.7 million Horn of Africa Groundwater Initiative was approved in May 2019. The two-year project will be implemented by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and includes support for consolidating and improving access to groundwater data, institutional capacity building, and feasibility studies for economically exploitable groundwater resources in three transboundary aquifers. The aquifers were prioritized by the IGAD member countries.
The Bank-executed, US$400,000 Support to Transboundary Water Management Project in Somalia has progressed rapidly. The activity is aimed at helping Somalia better understand its transboundary water so that the Federal Government of Somalia can have constructive dialogue with other countries with which it shares rivers and groundwater. A senior technical advisor is working with the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources to develop their approach, and several Government staff have been supported to travel to international forums focusing on transboundary water discussions. The support is being expanded to develop Somalia’s water resource modeling capacity.
The Nile Secretariat has continued to provide a platform for cooperation in the basin, informed by tools such as the Nile Basin Decision Support System and basin-wide hydromet and climate change models. The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) has pioneered regional standards and implementation capacity building for dam safety and dam cascades, and is proposing to host a Regional Center of Dam Safety Excellence.
CIWA financing provided to the Autorité du Bassin de la Volta (Volta Basin Authority; ABV) allowed the preparation of a number of investments (feasibility studies and detailed engineering design) for watershed restoration, riverbank protection and sustainable livelihoods. There were delays in project implementation due to a combination of over-optimism in project design, low implementation capacity of the client, and restructuring. As a result, there was not enough time to implement the investments that were prepared.
The information and Decision Support System for the Zambezi River Basin has been created as an evolving mechanism that operates through an interactive process to provide joint online and offline planning and problem-solving processes with the capability of engaging all or a number of basin state technical and policy representatives in the planning and decision-making process for an agreed objective. Its development was a collaborative process with national experts whose capacity was, in part, built through a number of trainings, setting a good foundation for future open and transparent collaboration.
The Digital Data Initiative is helping countries and basin organizations improve their capacity in information support systems where ground and remotely sensed data are collected, managed, and analyzed for specific applications such as assessment of water resources. The initiative will support selected countries and regional organizations in data collection, data management, analysis and interpretation. This analysis-ready information system for decision makers will improve evidence-based decisions about water resources.
CIWA’s programs are largely implemented in specific basins, economic communities, or countries. However, there are also some cross-cutting themes that CIWA promotes and tracks across all of its programs. These themes include resilience to climate change, gender equality and social inclusion, and strengthening local technical capacity. CIWA believes these are key ingredients for the sustainable and effective use of our resources, and some of the highlights related to these themes are outlined below.
Climate change resilience, gender equality, and strong local technical capacity are requisites to sustainable and effective use of the concrete and dollars embedded in our investments and infrastructure. For CIWA, the pathways through which individual human capital is advanced by implementation of the project, combined with sustainable regional cooperation, are the pathways for national prosperity.
Water is the means through which the impacts of climate change are first felt. Variability in rainfall and water run-off are already affecting the continent of Africa through extremes – droughts and floods – as well as threatening a ‘new normal’ of drying cities, reduced hydroelectric power, and shorter growing seasons. Like water, climate change does not respect national boundaries, and international cooperation is necessary for assessing risks, anticipating extreme events, and developing and operating infrastructure, among other actions. For this reason, climate concerns have been built into CIWA from its launch and are deeply embedded in our sub-regional programs as well as our analytic work.
The CIWA-financed Niger Basin Climate Resilience Investment Plan (CRIP), adopted in November 2015, was developed by the Niger Basin countries to mobilize and coordinate investments in climate resilience. The CRIP pairs strategic climate change responses with development planning through the Knowledge and Institutions Package (54 actions) and the Sectoral Investment Package (192 actions). Each package consists of actions identified in Niger Basin countries’ national climate adaptation processes as well as regionally identified actions.
The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) provided training to all Eastern Nile riparian countries on several high-priority climate resilience issues including reservoir sedimentation, drought monitoring, flood forecasting, and preparedness. Current work is expanding the geographic implementation of the program as well as implementing drought forecasting. Their work has been featured in two discussion papers from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Building Resilience to Shocks and Protracted Crises in the Middle East and North Africa and Water Management in Fragile Systems: Building Resilience to Shocks and Protracted Crises in the Middle East and North Africa. The NBI work is a good example of how services such as flood forecasting can benefit all riparian countries while not requiring physical investment in all countries – especially useful when fragile or conflict-affected countries are involved.
At a more community-focused level, the Nile Basin Discourse (NBD) implemented multiple activities to provide training and seed funding for climate-resilient alternative livelihoods programs (some focused toward youth and women) in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. They also facilitated climate risk management capacity building across the Nile Basin.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is working to better understand transboundary aquifers in order to improve sustainable conjunctive use of the resource. The regionally-coordinated conjunctive use of surface and groundwater is key to managing the increasing variability that Southern Africa is facing. So far only three out of 30 aquifers have been comprehensively assessed in order to understand their full groundwater potential, especially at the transboundary level. Currently, through SADC’s Soil and Groundwater Management Plan, the Shire Transboundary River/Aquifer System project is under implementation. Now that the SADC Groundwater Management Institute is fully established, the pace of work has accelerated, and it will require additional funds to cover the key aquifers that are not yet properly studied.
The Volta River Basin program supported ratification of the regional Water Charter, and in so doing provided training to 180 civil society organizations (30 per country) involved in climate resilience and the environment, bringing together key strategic partners from the six countries. The Autorité du Bassin de la Volta (Volta Basin Authority; ABV) will continue implementation of the strategic communication plan through community and rural radio to increase awareness of climate change issues in the basin.
The Zambezi Basin Commission has developed the Zambezi Water Resources Information System (ZAMWIS) with CIWA support. ZAMWIS is a database, planning tool, and flow forecasting system implemented to support climate monitoring and climate-sensitive planning in the basin. Earth observation data is regularly downloaded, processed, and uploaded to the ZAMWIS Database and thereby shared with the riparian states. Data collected by individual riparian states is shared on a quarterly basis. Rules and Procedures for Sharing of Data and Information Related to the Management and Development of the Zambezi Watercourse have been developed to facilitate data sharing among riparian states.
Finally, CIWA recently published a report entitled Climate Resilience in Africa: The Role of Cooperation around Transboundary Waters. This documents the relationships between climate change, livelihoods, and water management across Sub-Saharan Africa. The report proposes a framework for cooperation and climate resilience that would help River Basin Organizations, riparian states, water management authorities, development partners, and other stakeholders formulate strategies to tackle transboundary water issues.
CIWA is a vital source of technical assistance, offering support to transboundary water institutions through policy advice, research and analysis, and technical assistance. The analytical work supported by CIWA often underpins financing and investments. CIWA supports capacity development in the institutions that we serve, and participates in many conferences hosted by the transboundary institutions that we support. When countries can find a common technical and scientific understanding, a door has opened for expanding cooperation and dialogue.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Groundwater Management Institute is providing a technical and scientific platform for exchange among SADC institutions, governments and service agencies. Studies, guidelines, manuals and trainings benefit a wide range of stakeholders in the region.
Through its Dam Safety Program, the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) worked with the Eastern Nile countries of Egypt, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sudan to build technical capacity and establish harmonized regional policy and safety norms. Through the program, these countries have participated in a series of hands-on dam safety workshops, developed regional and national training curricula, and created national dam safety units. Future work will include expanding these activities to the Nile Equatorial Lakes region and building a Regional Center of Dam Safety Excellence. Developing national technical capacity to utilize dam cascade planning, and using flood forecasting to support early warning systems, are other examples of cooperation in the Nile Basin built on scientific collaboration.
Likewise, the Zambezi Water Resources Information System (ZAMWIS) is currently being modernized and fully operationalized to provide an effective platform for data, information, and knowledge collection, assessment and sharing in the Zambezi River Basin. The improved ZAMWIS will include a Decision Support System for riparian transboundary development scenario analysis and tools for flow forecasting and monitoring. It will be part of the technology utilized to mitigate the impact of water shocks with operational collaboration among riparian states, including such mechanisms as dam synchronization, flood and drought early warning systems, and coordination between riparian state disaster management structures.
Through the activities implemented by the projects, training on technical issues, and stakeholder forums, CIWA has provided opportunities for riparian states to come together on technical and scientific grounds. While as a society we have not realized the full advantages of water resource management transboundary cooperation, CIWA has helped to set the stage where countries can agree on their individual advantages and disadvantages in investment prioritization through a lens of commonly recognized and transparent information.
CIWA recognizes women’s and girls’ unequal access to water resources, their unequal participation in water management processes, and the unequal burden they shoulder from water-related development and climate challenges. To mitigate these inequalities CIWA facilitates the inclusion of nongovernmental organizations, civil society organizations, and other organizations representing the interests and rights of women in stakeholder advisory groups, dialogues with civil society, and stakeholder research, and makes major efforts to improve bottom-up and horizontal communication among civil society organisations.
Communications materials, information portals, and knowledge partnerships developed with CIWA support are informed by the gender-differentiated reality of climate risks and vulnerability that men and women face and the leadership roles women play in building climate change resilience. The Autorité du Bassin de la Volta (Volta Basin Authority; ABV) finalized its Communications Strategy and Plan, which consulted at least 500 people, including civil society organizations specifically representing women’s interests. Implementation through the community and rural radio outreach began in July 2019 to increase local stakeholder awareness.
Women’s water use priorities are sometimes in competition among water users and are therefore considered explicitly in planning and implementation of development processes to ensure equitable benefit sharing. To this end, CIWA-supported work with water commissions, water juries, irrigation cooperatives, and women’s organizations plays an important role in helping resolve water-related disputes among local stakeholders.
In the Zambezi Basin, the Zambezi Watercourse Commission approved a Gender Mainstreaming Strategy and Implementation Plan (November, 2018) which was harmonized with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) system-wide policy on gender equality. This gender strategy outlines five strategic objectives and priority measures that are being used to enhance gender mainstreaming in three areas of intervention: structural, personnel, and outputs. The Zambezi Watercourse Strategic Plan Report (February, 2019) also acknowledges the gender mainstreaming aspects of the project’s livelihood support activities in marginalized communities. SADC’s own gender mainstreaming framework was ratified by member states in 2015. In 2019, SADC’s cumulative female direct beneficiary number reached 9,150 women (58% of the total direct beneficiaries).
The Nile Basin Discourse (NBD) has specifically worked to enhance the knowledge and skills of women and youth in climate resilience and involve them in investment planning activities in the Nile Basin. Gender and youth engagements helped grassroot community leaders to overcome barriers and agree to equitable benefits from the Lakes Edward and Albert Fisheries and Water Resources Management Project II. At the Bara Akobo Sobat investment, the NBD orchestrated community dialogues that were key to allowing contractors access to the site and facilitated cooperation between Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) consultants and local communities. The NBD also leveraged seed funding from Coca Cola and the IHE Delft program to target women participants in climate-resilient livelihoods training.
Systematic gender mainstreaming policies and strategies are now actively being implemented in CIWA-supported basin authorities, and we expect to see enhanced hiring of women into high positions over the coming years. Efforts to obtain gender parity in training and events still fall short; however, activities like the NBI Young Professional Program target the recruitment of women and have attracted female engineers from many partner countries. Future movement toward parity will hopefully build as local women achieve greater access to tertiary education and professional degrees.
The last year has seen the closing of several major engagements, but apart from in the Horn of Africa, limited new commitments. The reasons for this are partly related to the specifics of each engagement, and partly related to the World Bank’s own process of reviewing its approach to regional programs in Africa. The World Bank’s review started from an understanding of the critical importance of regional integration in Africa and a desire to scale up impact through fewer, bigger projects. As a result, the Bank has appointed a new Director of Regional Integration for Africa (spanning both Sub-Saharan and Northern Africa) who is responsible for a more strategic and coordinated approach to regional programs. While this review process was ongoing, very few new regional engagements were approved, which significantly impacted CIWA’s pipeline.
Niger: The current CIWA-supported program has been moving very slowly and has consistently been rated as ‘Moderately Unsatisfactory’ by the Bank’s team. The project was restructured in 2018 to help focus the commitments, and the project was reduced in size from US$7.5 million to US$4.2 million. The project, due to close at the end of December 2019, was recently upgraded to ‘Moderately Satisfactory’ following implementation progress. Given slow movement, the planned International Development Association project that CIWA was going to co-finance has not progressed.
Volta: The Volta River Basin Strategic Action Programme Implementation project closed at the end of August 2019 with a ‘Moderately Unsatisfactory’ rating due to limited progress on the small infrastructure-related work to be supported under the project, and with roughly half of the CIWA grant of US$3.5 million disbursed. The design seems to have been overly optimistic in including infrastructure activities to be implemented in a four-year period, through a basin governance framework, with a relatively new agency and without any feasibility studies conducted at project entry. An Implementation Completion Report is under preparation and will provide a fuller set of lessons from this project.
While implementation progress has been slow, CIWA remains committed to the Niger Basin given its central importance to the socio-economic development of several poor and fragile states. CIWA will continue to work with the Niger Basin Authority, the legally mandated institution for supporting collective management of the river. However, CIWA will also seek to work directly with some of the individual countries to enable a stronger understanding of national dependence on the shared river, as well as how national investments can have regional benefits.
More broadly, CIWA recognizes that across West Africa, from the Senegal River to Lake Chad, there are some 20 transboundary water basins shared by 30 countries, each with their own set of challenges, but also some common experiences and interests. There are important lessons to be learned from some of the stronger institutions – such as the Organisation pour la mise en valeur du fleuve Sénégal (Senegal River Basin Development Authority; OMVS) – that could be shared regionally.
CIWA is currently finalizing the design of a Bank-executed program of analytics and technical assistance to support West African basins. Given the importance of flexibility (including the need to avoid CIWA resources being committed to programs that do not progress), and the need to reduce transaction costs, this is being designed as a flexible ‘West Africa’ programmatic instrument where individual activities can be added or dropped as conditions on the ground dictate.
Nile: The Nile program continues to progress well with the NBI Secretariat, Eastern Nile Technical Regional Office (ENTRO), and Nile Equatorial Lakes Subsidiary Action Program (NELSAP) each showing the commitment and capacity required for effective implementation. The NBD has also been effective at facilitating civic engagement. However, both the NBI and NBD need to make further progress in improving their financial sustainability. The NCORE program will formally close at the end of November 2020, but all of the current resources will have been used well before then. The NBI has started preparations for a next phase of support. The key challenge for the Nile is the need for a political agreement that would set the stage for more formal cooperation. Until that is reached, CIWA’s support will remain focused on technical ‘track two’ type cooperation.
Horn of Africa: Political progress in the Horn of Africa has created the space for deeper cooperation, including around transboundary water. CIWA support is growing rapidly, but at the same time there is a need to be both pragmatic about capacity and deliberate about a step-by-step process for scaling up support. At present five states – Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia – are in dialogue with each other and with the African Development Bank, European Union, and the World Bank about a program of large-scale regional investments. CIWA will be contributing to this process on issues related to transboundary surface and groundwater.
Zambezi: The project supporting the Zambezi Watercourse Commission (ZAMCOM) closed at the end of June 2019 with a Satisfactory rating and 100% disbursement. While CIWA has been in discussions with ZAMCOM about the possibility of a next stage of support, it is not yet clear that it will be of a scale that will justify a standalone project.
Batoka Gorge: CIWA support to the feasibility study and environmental and social impact assessment for the Batoka Gorge hydropower project ended at the end of December 2018. The Bank decided against another time extension and additional financing for the studies, and the studies are now being completed by the Zambezi River Authority using its own funds.
Okavango: The Okavango engagement is on hold and may be considered as part of a larger-scale approach.
Drawing from the thinking in West Africa, in the short term CIWA will focus on developing a flexible ‘Southern Africa’ programmatic instrument where individual activities can be added or dropped as conditions on the ground dictate.
Demand for CIWA’s support remains high, and CIWA remains committed to supporting African institutions as they seek to address some of the most pressing issues on the continent. Water is critical to human welfare, economic growth, and environmental sustainability – and most water in Africa is shared across national boundaries.
While the need and demand for supporting transboundary water cooperation in Africa is clear, the best way to turn resources into results is often not. Africa has done well in creating collective institutions to manage collective water but less well in ensuring that these institutions have the political, human, and financial capital required to deliver on their mandate. This is not surprising: managing water resources domestically is a complex multi-stakeholder challenge, and adding multiple countries increases the complexity exponentially. In some cases, the challenge may be a chicken-or-egg question: do results mobilize resources, or do resources enable results? Or more practically, will member states properly resource a collective institution if they do not see tangible benefits from it? These are complex questions that our clients face, that CIWA needs to keep learning about, and where CIWA can help different institutions learn from each other.
CIWA has supported multiple river basin institutions across Africa, but also Regional Economic Commissions, national governments on regional issues, and civil society networks. We have learned that one size does not fit all, and that step-by-step pragmatism by all stakeholders is required to build the trust, knowledge, and commitment required for mutual benefits. It is also clear that relatively small amounts of money can kickstart processes that will grow over time, such as CIWA’s support on the Zambezi, which helped unlock cooperation that is bringing much larger benefits.
As we look ahead, CIWA will aim for a mix of continuity and change. CIWA’s core strategy – combining long-term engagements in priority basins with shorter-term opportunistic investments, as well as working with a variety of stakeholders – remains robust. The need for increased focus on fragile situations and the potential for enabling more region-wide benefits from technology will require some change.
CIWA will be 10 years old in 2021, so the coming year is also an opportunity to reflect on what we have learned, to evaluate our impacts, and to set directions for the coming years.
