MEDA-Water : Promotion of the Program outputs

(The News N° 16 - December 2008)

The MEDA-Water Program was implemented from 2003 to 2008, in partnership with South Mediterranean Universities and their European counterparts. It aims at promoting local water management through cooperation projects in the sectors of training and knowhow transfer, technological innovation and users’ awareness.

Nine projects were implemented and the Regional Monitoring and Support Unit (RMSU) is responsible for promoting their outputs.

This unit is established in Jordan at the Regional Delegation of the European Commission, it is managed by a consortium coordinated by the Mediterranean Water Institute, with IOWater and the Danish SYKE institute as partners.

A conference, held from 28 to 30 April 2008 in Marrakech in Morocco, gathered a hundred representatives of the projects and Authorities from the countries concerned. They emphasized the significance of information exchanges at the regional level and the urgency to organize a dialogue between the authorities and the populations at the local level. The climate change consequences were a concern in all the discussions.

For each topic dealt with in the MEDA-Water projects, precise recommendations were formulated, in particular:

• Importance of decentralizing decisions on water management,
• Public information on suited lowcost technologies, in particular to local micro-companies,
• The “Public-Private” partnership as a new tool for implementing water policies. In 2008, 

RMSU, in partnership with EMWIS (Euro-Mediterranean Information System in the Water Sector) and Med- EUWI (Mediterranean component of the European Water Initiative), organized:

A synthesis of indicators for each project, of the benchmarking type;

• The publication of the outputs of the MEDA-Water program;
• The design and dissemination of “newsletters” and brochures for each project;
• The development of the "medawaterrmsu" website.