The Mara River Basin faces many challenging transboundary issues, which if unresolved will have devastating impacts for its people and world renowned wildlife. The Mara River flows between Kenya and Tanzania and provides the only perennial source of surface water to an often parched landscape. People on both sides of the border depend on the river as their main source of water for domestic as well as agricultural uses, and the river sustains two of the world’s most renowned wildlife areas, Masai-Mara National Reserve and Serengeti National Park, which straddle the national border. But demands for water on the Kenyan side of the Mara are growing rapidly, as a burgeoning population of more than half a million small-scale farmers and pastoralists increasingly compete with industrialized agriculture and urban centers for limited water resources. Deforestation, poor land management practices, and uncontrolled sewage discharges also threaten water quality.
GLOWS supports a wide array of coordinated activities to implement more integrated management of water in the region, working with local partners to meet the water needs of the basin’s peoples without harming aquatic ecosystems (learn about GLOWS activities in the basin by clicking >> here). GLOWS is addressing transboundary issues at the international level by working with the East African Community to forge an agreement between the countries of Kenya and Tanzania on the joint management of water resources in the Mara River Basin. Simultaneously GLOWS has been supporting the formation and operation of grassroots water users associations (WUAs) in the Kenyan and Tanzanian portions of the basin. Water users associations are formally recognized in the new national water policies of the region, and they are proving to be very effective permanent mechanisms for stakeholder participation in water management planning and decision making.
In December, 2006, GLOWS co-sponsored a Regional Transboundary Water Users Dialogue Workshop in Musoma, Tanzania. This workshop brought together, for the first time, members of WUAs and government water managers on each side of the border. The objectives of the workshop were:
- to share information and experiences on integrated water resources management in the Mara River Basin,
- to understand the similarities and differences between water policies governing the management of water resources in Tanzania and Kenya, and
- to understand the important roles and responsibilities of WUAs in the proposed transboundary Mara River Basin Management Framework.
The most important outcome of the workshop was the decision between Kenyan and Tanzanian WUAs to establish a transboundary WUA to facilitate transboundary cooperation at the grassroots level and to represent grassroots concerns in the planning, implementation, and monitoring of transboundary agreements at the East African Community. Members voted to immediately establish a secretariat and to authorize the secretariat to further develop the mechanism through which the new transboundary WUA will operate and what will be its roles and responsibilities in the emerging transboundary processes between the countries. The formation of the transboundary WUA was endorsed by representatives of the government water agencies from Kenya and Tanzania, and these government representatives agreed to work with the secretariat to fully integrate the transboundary WUA into the management process. To read the complete workshop report, click >> here.
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