Announcement and Registration

The Land and Water Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and the International Network on Participatory Irrigation Management (INPIM), with the support of the Ford Foundation, are pleased to announce the International Email Conference on Irrigation Management Transfer, which begins in June 2001.

The Conference will be conducted in English, but contributions in Spanish and French are welcome. Key documentation will be translated as far as possible.

The specific aims of the conference are to initiate exchanges about experiences world-wide with Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) and to identify various factors leading to success or failure.

Why IMT

In recent years, many countries around the world have embarked on a process to transfer the management of irrigation systems from government agencies to water users associations (or other private sector entities). Professionals in many countries are in the process of considering or adopting such reforms. Some are still unsure about whether to adopt reforms and how to design and implement them.

There is a desire among many to share in a world-wide forum questions and experiences about how to design and implement IMT. The Conference will create a platform for this. It will also provide a networking opportunity for participants. The Conference will be held in two sessions.

First Session
The First Session will be held in June 2001. It will include registration and collection of a small amount of information about participants, including their priority topics of interest. Participants are invited to read and respond to an Overview Paper and make further comments and suggestions on priority issues.

To this end background material will be posted on the Conference web site with case study papers about IMT in Mexico, Turkey, USA, Indonesia, Colombia, India and the Philippines, and short profiles of IMT experience in a range of other countries. A synthesis of comments will be distributed among participants but interactive exchanges will not begin until the Second Session in September/October.

Second Session
The Second Session will be held in September and October 2001. On each Monday starting from 4^th September onwards, a short 2-3 page Issue Brief on a selected topic will be prepared by a Topic Moderator and disseminated to all participants. Participants will then be invited to submit comments on that topic via the list server address. In the Second Session, exchanges on a given topic may continue for several weeks, depending on interest.

Register
We invite all of you who are interested to participate in the Email Conference to please register by filling in the Registration Form at our web site by just clicking on the following address to register now:

www.fao.org/landandwater/aglw/waterinstitutions/register.asp

Registration will provide the Conference Committee with information to compose a profile on participants and to define the key topics to be addressed for the Second Session. A short report summarizing the first round of comments and results of the registration questionnaire will be sent to all participants by August, prior to the start of the Second Session.

Please feel free to forward this Announcement to any of your colleagues and acquaintances who may be interested in this Conference.

We look forward to your active participation !

The Conference Committee
Douglas L. Vermillion, IMT Conference Coordinator
Martin Smith, Conference Co-organizer,
J. Raymond Peter, Conference Co-organizer, Executive Director of INPIM
Matthew Heberger, Coordinator of INPIM
Wolfgang Prante, Information Officer, Land and Water Division, FAO

Please register and send your reactions to  IMT-Moderator@fao.org