On Tuesday 4 November, Mali’s Minister of Energy and Water, Boubacar Diané, presided over the launch of a series of regional meetings in Bamako at the Dunia Hotel.
These meetings and workshops are part of the REWaRD-Volta River Basin project, which aims to reverse the trends of ecosystem and water resource degradation in the Volta Basin.
A total of five meetings are scheduled to take place in Bamako from 4 to 12 November.
The regional workshop for technical validation of deliverables on the assessment of environmental capital, ecosystem services and socio-anthropological impacts was held from 4 to 6 November. It was followed, from 7 to 8 November, by the workshop to establish the Regional Coordination of Users of the Volta Basin (CRU-BV).
In addition, the regional workshop to validate the founding documents of the Network of Parliamentarians, which will become the Inter-Parliamentary Committee of the Volta Basin (CIP), will open on Tuesday 11 November and run for two days. The project stakeholders will also hold the 3rd meeting of the Regional Steering Committee (RSC), before the 4th meeting of the RSC concludes the cycle of regional consultations in Bamako.
‘The REWaRD project is not an isolated programme,’ said Robert Dessouassi, Executive Director of the Volta Basin Authority (VBA), in his welcome address. According to him, the project constitutes an integrated platform for scientific planning, political coordination and citizen participation. Under the technical supervision of the VBA, it operates at the local, national and regional levels through the development of common tools such as the Network of Parliamentarians and the Regional User Coordination (RUC).
Minister Boubacar Diané, for his part, emphasised ‘the crucial importance of the Bamako meetings’, which mark the technical and scientific validation of fundamental work on environmental capital and ecosystem services. He also praised the democratic structuring of users’ voices and actions thanks to the establishment of the CRU-BV.
The REWaRD project is co-led by VBA and its partners, including the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Global Water Partnership West Africa (GWP-WA).
On behalf of the partners, Sidi Coulibaly, Acting Executive Secretary of GWP-AO, welcomed the holding of these meetings at a pivotal moment for the project. ‘The CRU-VB is much more than a framework for consultation. It embodies a political and civic desire to make the voices of communities heard, to value local knowledge and to promote sustainable and inclusive solutions,’ he said during the workshop on the establishment of the Regional Coordination of Users of the Volta Basin.
