A Hundred participants from eight countries learning to become water accounting experts

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in collaboration with IHE-Delft Institute for Water Education, is implementing a Regional Capacity Building for Water Accounting (CB4WA) for the Water Efficiency, productivity and Sustainability regional project (WEPS-NENA) since November 2020 to approximately 100 participants from Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia. The main objective of the training is to develop the projects water accounting (WA) team capacity to implement water accounting in practice.

This regional training offers a set of courses related to water accounting (WA) in English and French to WA team members in each project country, focusing on advanced water accounting using a range of tools, models and approaches. The long training spread over a year supports the second round of water accounting that build on the findings of the first round of rapid water accounting (RWA) that enabled the clarification of issues and critical uncertainties to be addressed.

Figure 1. Flows of the expected training course and assignments in the CB4WA

The philosophy of the training is to create WA teams with individuals having the complementary skills that are necessary to conduct WA. These individual skills are developed through a first set of training that cover a range of topics and tools including:  Introduction to QGIS, Water resources analysis and assessment, Remote Sensing for Agricultural Water Management, Fundamentals of environmental flow, Water accounting using WaPOR, and Environmental modelling using PC Raster.

After taking sub-sets of training, WA teams will work on group assignments, which directly contribute to theirsecond round of water accounting, with FAO and IHE-Delft providing advice. More courses will be offered in the next few months on water management and governance, Water Accounting plus and other topics reflecting the needs from the project countries. The group exercise realized by each country teams will directly contribute to improve the understanding of the water situation of an important water system in each country.

This series of online courses is implemented under the regional project “Implementing the 2030 Agenda for water efficiency/productivity and water sustainability in NENA countries” and under the Regional Water Scarcity Initiative. This project is funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).