AfriAlliance in Stockholm

13 September 2017

The Stockholm World Water Week that took place from 27 August to 1 September 2017 was also a great opportunity for several of the AfriAlliance partners to meet again face-to-face. AfriAlliance had its own way of closing this week: for a whole afternoon, hosted at the headquarters of the Global Water Partnership, the partners dived deeper into the content of the project.

Since the AfriAlliance partners mostly meet online, face-to-face meetings are a valuable opportunity to delve into deeper discussions and really focus on the content of the different Work Packages. So following a telco with those partners who couldn’t join us there, the chairs were set aside and the walls taken over: for this meeting, each Work Package had created a poster with recent outputs or work in progress.

The topics of AfriAlliance’s Work Packages (WP) are very diverse and so were the posters during the session. For example, WP1 showed the progress of the five Action Groups within the project. The AfriAlliance Action Groups bring together African and European peers on selected themes such as small-scale irrigation and the upscaling of water harvesting. WP2 asked for feedback on their illustration of climate change challenges in Africa. WP3 wanted input on their selection criteria for planning its next Innovation Bridge Event, while WPs 4 and 5 showed their respective progress: a report on the triple sensor approach to Monitoring & Forecasting and the first Social Innovation Factsheet. With so many topics, partners were challenged to think out of the box, which created new insights and new links between topics that will be further developed in the months to come.

In photo: AfriAlliance partners (from left to right): Steven Downey (GWP), Tarryn Quayle (ICLEI), Linda Velzeboer (IHE Delft), Mamohloding Thlagale (WRC), Jean-Marie Kileshye Onema (WaterNet), Kenge James Gunya (GWP), Salman Riaz (GWP), Robert Becht (ITC), Uta Wehn (IHE Delft), Edouard Boinet (INBO)