7th Africa Water Week

Libreville, Gabon, 29 October – 2 November 2018

GEMS/Water looks back at a very fruitful and interesting Africa Water Week, which is the highest level political event in the African region on the topic of water. This year’s meeting was the 7^th iteration of the biennial event and took place in Libreville, Gabon. GEMS/Water was represented by colleagues from all three GEMS/Water partner centres: Kilian Christ from the Global Project Coordination Unit (Nairobi, Kenya), Stuart Warner from the Capacity Development Centre (Cork, Ireland) and Dmytro Lisniak from the Data Centre (Koblenz, Germany).

On November 1^st, GEMS/Water convened a session on “Innovations in Water Quality Monitoring”, offering a number of talks on the importance of water quality monitoring and capacity development for monitoring programme design, as well as on the very intriguing topic of citizen science in water quality monitoring. The talks were followed by a panel discussion, which provided country perspectives on the situation of water quality monitoring and future developments of monitoring programmes in the region.

Also, the GEMS/Water team hosted a booth during the whole week, where information on the GEMS/Water programme in general, as well as capacity development in particular was provided to the visitors. The booth was a place for many fruitful discussions, where valuable insights were won on current and future developments of water quality monitoring in African countries.