Kick-off Namibia 22. Feb 2007

On the 22nd of February 2007, the CuveWaters project invited 30 stakeholders, practitioners and experts on water-related issues to a one-day “kick-off” workshop at the Habitat Research and Development Centre in Windhoek. The workshop aimed to inform its participants about the CuveWaters project and the activities planned.

Presentations from the German team emphasised the project’s structure with its two different “pillars”: supporting water supply in rural areas with water supply technologies such as rain water harvesting, solar disinfection, desalination of groundwater and artificial groundwater recharge on the one hand, and pursuing the concept of semi-decentralised urban infrastructure systems with waste water considered as a valuable resource (recycling of fresh water, nutrients, and energy) in informal urban settlements on the other. The idea of using cleaned waste water (free of bacteria, viruses, pathogens) for (small-scale) irrigation purposes to improve food safety and provide alternative income was presented as one central part of this technology.

In order to put the project into the Namibian context, four briefing papers on relevant topics were presented by the Desert Research Foundation of Namibia:

• Integrated Water Resource Management in the Namibian part of the Cuvelai Basin (Patrik Klintenberg, Clarence Mazambani, and Komeine Nantanga)
• Land and Water Policy Framework (Wolfgang Werner)
• Ecological Sanitation in the Cuvelai Sanitation. Issues, Aspects and User Preferences and Behaviours (Birga Ndombo, Clarence Mazambani, Komeine Nantanga, and Patrik Klintenberg)
• Small scale irrigation and agriculture (Komeine Nantanga, Clarence Mazambani, and Bertus Kruger)

The project was welcomed as a good initiative that should give strong consideration to the issues of capacity building, the affordability of selected technologies (ability and willingness of the people to pay), and appropriate coordination with other initiatives. It will take close community involvement in order to identify people’s needs and their preferences with regard to service provision and appropriate technologies. Intensive community consultations right from the start, from the design phase up to implementation, will also be a precondition for this and for community-based ownership.

In the discussions, it was emphasised that the CuveWaters goal of linking integrated water resources management (IWRM) to the process of both securing and developing the region's endogenous resource potentials in a multi-resource mix, and implementing demand-driven and adapted technological solutions in innovative waste water treatment technologies, is very ambitious and will need support and commitment from all relevant stakeholders.

The workshop revealed a lot of important information, new ideas and valuable opinions which will provide guidance for the project team in the planning and adjustment of the next activities.