Notice from Water Resources Institute

1 INTRODUCTION

The government of Uganda (GoU) has for more than a decade now undertaken reforms aimed at making Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) the foundation for water sector management and development.  As part of the reforms, an appropriate policy and institutional framework for IWRM, including regulatory, planning, and development has been established.

However, whilst there is a degree of expertise to support this effort, several capacity gaps remain including the need to address emerging issues such as the increasing climate variability and change that is leading to higher occurrences of extreme events e.g. floods and droughts in the country. This calls for integration of climate risks and opportunities into the planning and designing of Uganda's development programs and infrastructure, which requires specific skills set that are not widely available in country. 

Government of Uganda (GoU) has now decided to develop more in-depth training opportunities including establishing a Water Resources Institute (WRI) that is housed in the Ministry of Water and Environment, to deal with water resources and climate related issues. The WRI will deal with four key priority areas of Applied Training,

Applied Research, Dialogue, and Documentation/outreach.  The WRI is envisaged to be a "one stop centre" dealing with both current and a futurist emerging water resources issues in the country. It will provide cutting edge, top of the range solutions for the various stakeholders through creating a platform that congregates multi-stakeholders in a mutually beneficial manner for the country. Currently, there is disconnect between the practitioners and the academia; the WRI will bridge this gap between the academic /theory and practice/industry.

The establishment of the WRI is premised on the following; Recognizing that the professional staff that work in the different directorates and agencies of the Ministry of Water and Environment come from different backgrounds and levels of expertise due to the specialized nature of courses offered by universities and colleges.

This calls for implementation of tailor made training courses, postgraduate training, and induction for officers joining the directorates, agencies, deconcentrated structure and local governments. The Institute aims to organise and facilitate multi stakeholder dialogues and implementation of outreach programmes on topical issues related to water resources at community, district, deconcentrated sub-national, national, East Africa region and continental levels.  This will be achieved through existing sector platforms, which will be either strengthened and /or expanded to ensure inclusiveness and relevance. CLICKHEREFOR MORE ON THESE TERMS OF REFERENCE