10th Multi-Stakeholder Forum, Brussels, March 2004

 EU Water Facility

Member States announced that they have agreed to support the EU Water Facility payable in 2 phases of Euro 500 million each. The next step is formal agreement at the next Council of Ministers' meeting in April. It was reported that the funds will be managed by and through European Development Fund modalities.  The only 'allocation' is to make a contribution to the Africa Development Bank's Water Facility that has recently been launched. 

The question is how spending under this Facility will link to the priorities of the Water Initiative - if at all. Currently the two operate with separate mandates.  The Water Facility was on the agenda of the EU-WI meeting for information only.   NGOs questioned what role the Finance Working Group will play in establishing the process for focussing the Water Facility on the key priorities in the EU-Africa agreement - e.g. delivering water and sanitation coverage targets, through donor harmonisation and prioritisation within national budgets, in the context of water resource management. 

This requires follow-up in the Finance Working Group (see below)

Monitoring

NGOs stated that we need to push monitoring of the EU-WI to evaluate how and whether the initiative is meeting its own objectives, and secondly to support and link up to the global monitoring initiatives in particular the Joint Monitoring Initiative, through representation at the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) meetings.

Organisation of the EU-WI

Kathryn Day, the Director of DG-Env chaired these discussions.

Member States had met the previous day and agreed to a new, slightly different structure than the draft submitted earlier. The main differences being:

• Multi Stakeholder Forum (MSF)/Multi Stakeholder Steering Group is at the centre driving the initiative in terms of coordination policy and strategic guidance.  It will include as stakeholder representatives, 3 service operators (public and private) and 3 NGOs. After discussion it was agreed to keep number of member states down from 25 to keep it lean.  The numbers of IFIs and other institutions was not properly discussed or agreed.  
• Working Groups remain as functional bodies, where the action-orientated work takes place, and chaired by a member state. They include stakeholders and partners. Unclear about participation of regional CSOs. 
• MSF this is an open forum meeting one a year
• Regions their role and the relationship with the working groups was not defined

Members of the UK Water Network (NGO) had prepared the following points:

1. Want to take forward the latest version of the framework, despite its fairly complex and bureaucratic structure, because it reflects the principles of partnership better than the September draft. It is a more accountable and transparent structure, but it does still need much greater attention to definitions of role and responsibilities, to process and decision making, to coordination and to action.  Specifically:
   
   Who are stakeholders?  What are their roles & responsibilities? 
   
   Views and opinions of Multi-stakeholder Forum can assist How? What? When?
   
   Will there be a statement of principles for participation of stakeholders, such as in the UK PAWS initiative?
   
   Who are partners? What are theirs role and responsibility at each level? How do they relate to stakeholders?
   
   What is the geographical catchment area of the Regional MSF?  Is it defined by the region of programmatic implementation?
   
   What responsibility do AMCOW (African Ministers Council on Water) and other regional government partners have to include and work with stakeholders in a meaningful way? How will this be actioned? What resources are made available for this?
   
   How do the Regional MSF and the MSF steering committee?  If the regional job is to design and mange the regional components and the MSF job is to approve work programmes and adopt practical decisions, we need to define how it fits together, the responsibilities of each in relation to the other and why and when decisions get made.
   
   Partner CSOs must be given a clear role to play so that their participation is meaningful.

A decision was taken to raise the status of the working groups and to keep the steering group in the centre. The secretariat will revise the draft and work on the definitions

Finance

UK government (DFID) lead this working group. They will follow-up the research produced last year and have outlined a new programme of work to organise and index financing available to LDCs and to identify actions to get money where it is needed rather then to what meets the political agenda.  Requested volunteers to identify themselves for this group before 31 March to j.delmon@dfid.gov.uk

Research

They support scientific research, identify and exchange information on international scientific research efforts that support the objectives of the initiative. On-going current work includes:

• Okavango Basin programme designing future scenarios in the basin and the impact of irrigation
• RiverTwin establishing international water research partnerships, e.g. Benin-Germany-Uzbekistan
• WADE groundwater recharge research and exchange in Namibia, South Africa, Israel and Canada

Africa

Following the AMCOW Addis conference, there are now draft work programmes for Africa on both the WSS and IWRM components; however more details on objectives, outputs and time-tables are needed. Also the work programme still needs to be approved jointly by EU and AMCOW/TAC by CSD12 and if possible to have a meeting before then. Denmark requested travel assistance for African governments to attend such a meeting.  

Denmark reported that several countries have agreed to hold national level dialogues on the WSS component of the EU-WI, they are: Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, South Africa, Ghana, Congo-Brazzaville, Cape Verde, CAR. NGOs asked why this did not include countries in most need such as Ethiopia or Nigeria.  Response was that these were the only countries that came forward via AMCOW.

Also, France is preparing a finance report for each of the River Basins within the programme. It will contain a baseline and overview of the activities to be supported for: Lake Chad (GTZ); Niger (Netherlands); Lake Victoria (Sweden); Volta (Denmark).  The report will be presented at Stockholm Symposium.

NGOs asked what was being done to guarantee African CSO participation.  The response was that AMCOW had recognised ANEW in Addis and it was hoped that this would improve coordination between African governments and civil society. In response to further questioning, the Commission agreed that they would keep up the pressure on AMCOW to involve CSOs.

Significantly the NGOs in the UK Water Network said that although we welcomed the progress made during the day, and affirm our commitment to the EU-WI, we will be meeting in July to review our continued participation at this level.  The reason being that to date participation in the EU-WI has been of almost no value to our organisations due to the lack of progress.  Thus, at the next MSF meeting in June we hope the following will be resolved:

• Clear working plans for the working groups which will clarify the objectives and practical means to achieve them for each working group
• Decisions on a governance structure with more detail on roles and responsibilities of the various bodies and actors
• Monitoring that meets the commitments of the EUWI as well as the links to global JMP

We requested that the secretariat facilitate a definitive June MSF by sending out papers in good time and creating an agenda that includes clear objectives and outputs for the meeting.