International DAAD Alumni Summer School: „Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor - Natural Hazards, Climate Change, Governance and Human Rights”

In informal settlements of mega cities of Sub-Saharan Africa, water and sanitation services are still severely lacking. As a result, a high number of people suffer from preventable illnesses and die every year. Population growth will further increase these challenges in future. Improving global access to clean drinking water and safe sanitation is therefore one of the most effective means to enhance living conditions in order to break the cycle of poverty, enhance public health and save lives in these urban slums.
Flash floods caused by heavy precipitation events in small areas pose a great threat for especially the urban poor, living in informal settlements like slums. In these areas of high risk, there is no or only inefficient resilience against a variety of hazards. The lack of infrastructure specifically in the water sector leads to an inability to deal with storm water. The main form of waste and sewage disposal is an open sewage channel running through the slum areas. The deposition of waste in the surrounding living quarters and areas used for urban and peri-urban agriculture by a flash flood increases health risks.

The Alumni Summer School “Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor - Natural hazards, climate change, governance and human rights” offers the chance for researchers to tackle the problems related to the fast growing informal and degrading formal urban settlements in an inter-disciplinary team. The Kenyan capital city Nairobi is taken as an example since most work has been done and results have been achieved in technical cooperation with Kenyan institutions for sustainable improvement of the water and sanitation sector.

The Summer School is jointly funded by DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit).

For more information on the event, please visit the sub-section "Training" on this webpage and then "Urban Poor".

IWM concepts play an important role for rural communities to adapt to impacts of climate change. The holistic concept of resource management that refers to a watershed or hydrological defined planning area is following a systematic approach with a major focus on sustainable development and manifold techniques. Farmers learn to assess the potentials as well as the challenges of their watershed; they work for improving soil moisture as well as groundwater recharge by watershed development measures increasing infiltration – even under increasing climate uncertainties. They reduce over-abstraction of resources and improve the resource utilisation efficiency; they bridge the resources gap between the rainy seasons by limited water storage facilities still manageable by local communities and new water saving irrigation techniques. In general they improve their resilience towards natural disasters resulting from climate change and reduce their dependency on just one income factor, thus they reduce drastically their vulnerability.
(source: G. Förch (2009): Integrated watershed management - a successful tool for adaptation to climate change. Rural 21 Vol. 43 No. 4 pp. 22-25)


 
IWMNet is a network of universities in Germany, Eastern and Southern Africa that emphasises capacity building and research in the field of Integrated Watershed Management (IWM). With the aim of promoting a holistic approach to water resources and sanitation management, it offers Master Programmes, short courses and summer schools and supports applied research within watersheds. In consideration of existing policies, strategies and reform agendas of partner countries, it closely cooperates with relevant institutions to strengthen the ongoing water sector reform processes in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

IWMNet is funded under the 9th European Development Fund (EDF), ACP-EU Water Facility and scheduled from October 2007 until September 2011. It closely cooperates with the German Alumni Water Network (GAWN) as well as the EU-funded capacity building project in Integrated Sanitation Management (UCDISM). Other partners include: the International Water Management Institute (IMWI) in Ethiopia, German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) Water Sector Reform Programmes in Kenya and Tanzania, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).