Multiple Use Systems programme kicks off in South Africa

An international five-year programme involving a wide range of partners has been launched to study Models for Implementing Multiple-use Water Supply Systems for Enhanced Land and Water Productivity, Rural Livelihoods and Gender Equity, MUS for short.

River basins where the study will start shortly are: Limpopo, Nile, Indus-Ganges, Mekong, and the Andean ‘virtual basin’. All among the benchmark basins of the Program of the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), whose Challenge fund is supporting the project.

IRC staff Patrick Moriarty, Catarina Fonseca, and Stef Smits helped facilitate the inception meeting of the MUS project led by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), from 27 Jan – 7 Feb 2004 in South Africa.

The project goal is to improve poor people’s food security and health, alleviate poverty and enhance gender equity through more productive use of water. This will be achieved by forming learning alliances of researchers, NGOs, private operators and governments to identify and up scale field-tested models and guidelines for self-financed, sustainable multiple-use water supply systems.

Partners

The majority of the other partners in this US$ 1.5 million programme are from outside the domestic water sector: NRI (UK), International Development Enterprise (IDE) (USA and India), CIAT (Colombia), CINARA (Colombia), Mekkele University (Ethiopia) , Mvuramanzi Trust (Zimbabwe), Catholic Relief Services (CRS) (Kenya), Khon Kaen University (Thailand), and Population and Community Development Association (Thailand).

IRC partner CINARA (Ines Restrepo) also attended the meeting and will coordinate the work in the 'Andean virtual Basin'. Other IRC partners are also likely to be involved in various aspects of the work.

IRC leads dissemination and scaling-up

IRC (Patrick Moriarty) leads the dissemination and preparation for up scaling, and chairs the Steering Committee on this aspect, but all partners will be directly involved in these efforts. As a co-convener of the global Thematic Group on Productive Uses of Water at the Household Level, he facilitates the contacts with this group. Other lead organisations will facilitate contacts between the project and partners and sites they are already familiar with, leading to the formation of a global learning alliance.

IRC will support both national and global learning alliances through the design, at the start of the project, of information platforms to disseminate models and guidelines, using websites, publications, policy briefs and advocacy material in user-friendly format (text versions, CD, video, electronic). Moreover, all project partners will use their own publicity channels for further dissemination.