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You Are Here: Home » General News » Workshop on improvement of water governance in West Africa begins in Accra
A five-day workshop geared at improving water governance in the West Africa sub region began in Accra Monday May 17, 2010.
Organised by the Global Water Partnership – West Africa (GWP-WA) in partnership with Ghana (Country Water Partnership) CWP, the workshop, which is the fourth for journalists in the sub region, since 2007, is being held under the auspices of the Ministries of Information, Water Resources Works and Housing.
The capacity building workshop is being held as part of a Programme for the Improvement of Water Governance in West Africa (PIWAG) and sponsored by the European Commission and Global Water Partnership in the framework of the ACP-EU Water Facility and by the Global Water Partnership Organization (GWPO).
The Media Workshop is under the theme: “The Contribution of big water infrastructures to the sustainable development of countries in West Africa” and has attracted over 40 participants from countries in West Africa.
Participants include print, radio, TV and online journalists from the public, private or community-owned media organisations of the ECOWAS member countries with or without a Country Water Partnership, which are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea Conakry, Guinea Bissau, The Gambia, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
In all, about twenty to twenty five (20- 25) journalists will come from outside Ghana to join fifteen Ghanaian journalists.
According to the organisers, the theme for the week-long workshop takes into account the ongoing ECOWAS dialogue on “Large hydraulic infrastructures in West Africa” and the contribution made by the International Conservation Union (IUCN), through the electronic dialogue on dams.
West Africa is according to some sources the poorest or the less developed region in the world and there is still a great need to build large hydraulic infrastructures in order to better manage water for development purposes, but by doing so, environmental issues should be taken care of in order to have a harmonised and sustainable development for the benefit of the population, they maintained.
The organisers explained that the workshop aims to inform, sensitise the media men and women on the challenges related to the management of water resources and their mobilisation for development purposes, mainly with the context of climate change issues strongly highlighted by the COP 15 in Copenhagen.
They said it also aims at having spokespersons among media people for better awareness raising both at the level of political leaders and of the respective populations for cultural and behavioural changes.
The workshop will be organised in three sequences and will have the first part, which will be for two days, devoted to the presentations of specialists, followed by discussions between the participants and representatives of basin management organisations.
The second part commences on the third day and will be devoted to field visits to Akosombo and eventually another infrastructure if possible to meet the populations and actors of the management of these infrastructures in order to collect their opinions and methods.
On the other hand, the last part which will be for the last two days of the workshop, will be devoted to the writing of articles and the editing of the newsletter for print journalists, to the recording and the editing of the magazine for radio journalists.
The GWP is an institution that was created in 1996 in Stockholm to support the countries in the sustainable development and management of their water resources.
GWP’s vision is for a water secure world. In line with this mission, GWP West Africa gave itself the task of building alliances and the institutional capacities of its members in order to encourage and to strengthen networks of research, expertise and information on IWRM.
GWP/WA has organised since 2007 training workshops for West African journalists to inform and sensitise them on the current and emerging challenges related to the
management of water resources.
Thus, in December 2007, the first workshop was held in Bamako, Mali on the topic of “IWRM and Environment, the role of the media”. This workshop was followed in July 2008 in Niamey by a second one on the topic: “Water and climate change in West Africa – IWRM issue in Niger”.
This workshop gathered both journalists and members of Niger’s Parliament. A third one was held in July 2009 in Cotonou on the theme “the contribution of the media to the good management of transboundary waters in West Africa”.
The workshops (Bamako, Niamey and Cotonou), gathered a great number of journalists who committed themselves to cover issues related to various themes discussed during the workshops.
By Edmund Smith-Asante