Capacity building: Vocational training to improve water management

Tuesday July 6, 2021, 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. (CEST / Paris time)
With simultaneous interpretation (French - English - Spanish), on Zoom

Despite the progress made by States (on target 10 of the Millennium Development Goals, on Sustainable Development Goal n°6), Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) remains very imperfectly implemented (with a score of 54%1), more than half of the world's population still do not have safely managed sanitation services, and more than 2 billion people still do not have access to safely-managed drinking water2.

Substantial funding is allocated to improve the situation, including the 9.3 billion dollars in Official Development Assistance allocated to the sector for 2019 alone3. These funds primarily target the infrastructure necessary for water and sanitation services and water resource management.

But this funding still too often neglects capacity building through vocational training. This is a particularly glaring problem for the viability of these hydraulic infrastructures, when we know that 85% of States consider that they do not have sufficient human resources to implement their plans for access to water and sanitation4. More broadly, and beyond just water and sanitation services, it is a problem that contributes to the unsustainable management of water resources by all of its uses (domestic but also agricultural and industrial).

In a period of strong budgetary constraints, it is therefore vital to meet the growing demand for qualified personnel in order to optimize the investments made for water management (of rivers, lakes and aquifers, but also of municipal water and sanitation services) and optimize its uses.

This webinar aims to present the roles that training systems and donors can play for capacity building in the water sector and for all of its uses.