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Day World Water, the Minister of Water Resources in Sierra Leone shares his thoughts on the ambitious goals

As the newly appointed Minister of Water Resources in Sierra Leone, I am fully aware that we are at the beginning of a long way towards achieving our goals of national policy on water and Sanitation (pdf). The policy contains the ambitious expansion of the national water supply and sanitation to 74% and 66% respectively. This represents a significant increase in the annual rate of WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) the provision of services. The policy also laudable ambition to ensure proper management of national water resources and the strengthening of government institutions to operate more efficiently. To a new department, the burning issues are where we need to focus our attention and what are our priorities?

on the important issue of water resource management (WRM), this means that we need to focus on four basic principles. This is important because there is a limited national capacity -. In terms of experience, financial and material resources

Firstly, we can not manage water resources, so we need to control certain parameters important hydrological, such as precipitation, groundwater and surface water extraction water and soil use changes. Second collection, raw data and results of our analysis should inform practice management of water resources. This requires rules and regulations put in place, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities across multiple organizations and at different levels. Then, we need to ensure continuous improvement of the water supply infrastructure, with an emphasis on maintaining water services work. Finally, we need a comprehensive approach that takes into account other health and economic benefits that come from good management of water resources and land.

These four actions are fundamental and rudimentary, many interrelated reasons why ensuring sound management of water resources is a challenge for fragile states such as Sierra Leone. Countries like ours, for example, are often presented with a "one size fits all" guidelines for the management of water resources which recognizes no national capacity. This can inadvertently due to inactivity generic integrated resource management (IWRM) approaches can be overwhelming for government staff. The project is conducted in Sierra Leone - a three-year program supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) - consists of several local interest groups, all of which have different concerns about the quantity and quality of resources as the basis for the supply of water, or as a receiver discards. The most difficult discussions in the basin had Rokel-Seli River, upstream or downstream of the dam Bumbuna.

Therefore, we decided to focus the first project in this area. The Seli Rokel basin represents a microcosm of the problems of Sierra Leone water resources, and a local approach ensures that government agencies are not exceeded. The project also aims to establish an effective monitoring of water resources and the collection of data as a basis for decision making. To do this, we put in place institutional mechanisms for data collection, storage and publication, as well as dialogue and decision making between stakeholders with a wide range of diverse interests in the security of the water

Maligi Momodu minister of water resources for the Government of Sierra Leone


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