Closing workshop of the “Regional Cooperation for a Sustainable Management of Water Resources in the Maghreb – CREM” project / BGR module, Tunis, June 14-16, 2022.

The Sahara and Sahel Observatory organized the closing workshop of the “Regional Cooperation for a Sustainable Management of Water Resources in the Maghreb – CREM”/BGR module, on June 14-16, in Tunis, with the partnership of the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR - Germany).

The opening speech was delivered by Mr. Abdessalem Kallala, on behalf of the OSS Executive Secretary. He restated the OSS commitment to support countries in sustaining the achievements. He also reiterated the OSS thanks to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) for having financed the project that covered Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia from 2014 to 2022, and made it possible to provide tools and methodologies for the sustainable management of groundwater and make them usable by government institutions in the three partner countries.

The three-day workshop was an opportunity to evaluate the project, summarize the results and make recommendations for the consolidation of the achievements, the improvement of the outcomes and the implementation of similar projects on other sites.

This project comes to end with a number of results related to the decision support system to be reinforced and maintained by the national stakeholders, while consolidating the irrigated areas maps and estimating water withdrawals for agricultural use under the GMES&Africa project – OSS North Africa Consortium.

For the record, the CREM project was made of two modules: the GIZ module (CREM – GIZ) and the BGR module (CREM – BGR), each carried out in partnership with a German executing agency, namely the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GlZ).

The BGR (CREM – BGR) module had the objectives of i) providing the three partner countries with up-to-date data and improved methods for sustainable groundwater management and ii) building the capacities of specialized institutions in terms of sustainable water resources management.