Sixteen countries to take part in UN-Water Accra workshop
Yinka Adeyemi, 09 September 2004

About 50 participants from 16 African countries will take part in a UN-Water/Africa three-day workshop on geo-water information development and management which opens in Accra on September 15.

The workshop is co-organized by the Development Information Services Division of the Economic Commission for Africa and supported by the local offices of the International Water Management Institute, The Food and Agriculture Organization, Environment Canada, the Water Resources Commission of Ghana and other relevant government agencies.

The participants are senior decision makers and technical personnel drawn from national and regional institutions responsible for geo-water data development and management.

Participants will be exposed to many initiatives of UN-Water/Africa, with emphasis on the African Regional Water Clearing House (AWICH) which provides the basis for linking educational, governmental, non-profit and commercial entities interested in water research, conservation and management at the community and regional levels.

The workshop would teach the participants to create metadata records using real data they are expected to bring. Those records will, in turn, be loaded on the AWICH node.

UN-Water/Africa expects the participants to constitute a pool of focal persons in their respective countries who will coordinate the development of national water data infrastructure and the sharing of regional and global data.

UN-Water/Africa plans to hold two other workshops