WWF RUAHA WATER PROGRAM-SWAUM EXIT WORKSHOP DAY 2

First Panel discussion on how to address vinyungu (bottom valley cultivation) challenges in progress...

Second Panel discussing on sustainable funding for water resources management in progress...

WWF Tanzania has been working in the Great Ruaha River catchment with a focus on promoting and improving integrated water resources management since 2002. 

This was the same year that new National Water Policy was introduced to provide a comprehensive legal and institutional framework for sustainable development and management of the nation’s water resources. Throughout the intervening period however the once perennial Great Ruaha River (GRR) has run dry in the dry season for progressively longer periods. 

Throughout the period 2011-2016 WWF Tanzania has been piloting the SWAUM programme – Sustainable Water Access, Use and Management. 

SWAUM was explicitly framed and designed to address a situation – shortfalls in water governance in the GRR catchment – that was understood to be ‘complex’ (i.e. widespread conflicts and disagreements, knowledge gaps and uncertainties, and weak organisational capacity), and has sought to identify and address the institutional constraints, within and between both formal organisations and local communities.

Lack of awareness or acknowledgment of these strategic constraints, and of any commensurate response, considerably weakened or undermined the effectiveness and potential sustainability of earlier management and technical initiatives. 

SWAUM’s empirical findings are that there are systemic shortcomings in aspects of integration critical to the governance system – the ‘critical dimensions of integration’ (CDIs) – and given the continuing deference to IWRM as the governance model in the Rufiji Basin IWRMD Plan.

unless these shortcomings are addressed, the pattern of governance failure will not be broken, nor the associated drying of the GRR reversed.