The ambassadors of water

To outsiders, the world of water resource management remains a largely obscure place, securely guarded by specialists and their scientific jargon. Water experts excel in talking to each other, but in the process they often forget to engage civil society. The result: small communities and their local problems are sidelined.

L’Ambassade de l’Eau [the Embassy of Water], a French non-governmental organization, has set out to change this dynamic by strengthening the connection between the large organizations working on the macro level of water management and small, easily forgotten communities.

“It is easier to find €5 million to build a wastewater treatment plant than to get €5,000 to build toilets in a remote village school,” says Jeannette Prétot, the Embassy’s president and the driving force behind its activities. “There is no organization that takes care of the little ones – and this is where we come in.”

Neighborhood politics

Prétot, who today sits on the board of the Seine and Normandie water utility and is a member of the World Water Council, first got involved in the world of water for purely personal reasons – out of concern for the well-being of her three young children.

In 1987 Prétot and her husband bought an old watermill on the Morin River in the village of Mouroux, 50 kilometers east of Paris.

“We had this wonderful water running right in front of our house, but it was not clean – there were things floating in it,” Prétot explains. “The problem was worsened by the fact that at various places along the river – including right next door – people were releasing practically raw sewage into the water.

“It brought the problem of pollution very close to home – literally: my children used to play by – and sometimes in – the river and I was worried they were going to contract diseases from the polluted water.”

Instead of fighting it out with the neighbors, Prétot says her “civic instinct” kicked in and she took the problem to the local council. “The mayor more or less sent me packing,” she recalls. “He basically told me to go back to my kitchen and let the council take care of local management and the river’s water quality.”

Far from giving up her cause, Prétot decided to give her personal grievance a formal expression through the creation of a non-profit organization, Generation Europe Aquapur, which worked to protect water quality in the two local rivers, the Grand Morin and the Petit Morin.

Between 1997 and 2004, Generation Europe Aquapur campaigned to raise awareness of the problem of water pollution among local politicians, many of whom attached little importance to environmental issues, and even less to the idea of working together with other local councils to manage water resources.

“Most of the mayors in this area manage their village the way they would manage their farm: as a private property, where neighbors should not get involved with each other’s business,” she says. “We had to really drive home the message that to manage the river sustainably there had to be cooperation between the 193 villages in the river basin.”

Following the organization of a water workshop for local council members, Prétot and her colleagues also started organizing “water classes” for schoolchildren, five-day courses to teach children about water and its importance.

During this period, Prétot not only learned the specialist language of water, but also acquired a sharp insight in the dynamics of local and regional political decision-making mechanisms and the importance of civil-society involvement in water management.

Following the creation of a local water commission to protect the Morin rivers, Prétot dissolved the NGO Generation Europe Aquapur in 2004, though she remained involved with local water politics and continued to organize water classes for schoolchildren across the country.

The idea for the creation of the Embassy of Water, a NGO with a broader, more international focus, was born when Prétot attended a meeting of African water ministers at the 2006 World Water Forum in Mexico.

“A mother got up and addressed the audience,” Prétot remembers. “She told us that after a well had been dug in her village, her daughter no longer needed to fetch water from distant water sources and had started going to school in a neighboring village.

“However, there were no toilets in the school and when the girl one day went to relieve herself in the bushes near the school, she was raped. I was shocked: we have laws on international cooperation and development aid, and yet, we can’t find €5,000 to build toilets in a school in Africa.

“This was why I created the Embassy of Water in the first place: to find a way of funding small projects in rural communities and of helping people whose voice is otherwise not heard. ”

Bottom-up approach

Since its creation in 2006, the Embassy has sharpened its geographical and thematic focus. From a NGO that aimed to broadly raise awareness of water and sanitation issues and stand up for the interests of small communities in developing countries, the Embassy has evolved into an organization with a Mediterranean focus that connects macro- and micro-level water management by putting young aspiring water experts in charge of concrete projects.

“We want to confront tomorrow’s water leaders with the realities on the ground and show them that water problems are not just theoretical,” says Prétot. “We want them to experience this first hand and show them that local problems have a global impact.”

Prétot, who is of Lebanese origin but has lived in France for over 30 years, describes herself as both “Arab-Lebanese” and “European-French”, and says her two identities have found each other in the Mediterranean.

Inspired by the creation of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) – the 2007 partnership between European Union countries and 16 Mediterranean countries – Prétot the following year launched the Mediterranean Union of Young Water Ambassadors (UMJAE) as part of the Embassy.

This network of engineering students currently works with 29 “Water Ambassadors” from 11 Mediterranean countries. Engaging local communities and developing bottom-up projects, the UMJAE organized water workshops in Mediterranean countries. Students researched the state of local water resources and assessed needs on the ground. Through consultation with community leaders and local institutions, they then outlined 11 projects, ranging from the protection of a river ecosystem in Algeria to education about water issues in Gaza.

Five projects have currently been earmarked for further development. They include two projects to address local water treatment in Morocco and Tunisia, the educational project in Gaza and a second project in Gaza to protect coastal waters. A fifth project in Lebanon aims to reverse rural-urban migration from the village of Deir al-Ahmar in the Bekaa Valley.

In addition to this strong focus on local involvement, the UMJAE aims to “break down mental barriers” between the north and south and to cultivate a shared Mediterranean identity among the students.

Fabien Esculier, a former Water Ambassador and the UMJAE’s first coordinator, said the experience of working with peers from Morocco, Syria and Palestine made him aware of a shared Mediterranean identity that he had never imagined before.

“The fact that we were all working together and discussing issues left a strong impression on me,” he says. “I felt it could be a first step on the road to peace in the region. Of course there were also tensions in the group, but the fact that we were talking was a beginning.”

Funding mechanisms

To enable students to work on small local projects around the Mediterranean, Prétot has continued to seek support and advice from regional, national and international organizations and teaching institutions.

The Mediterranean Network of Engineering Schools and the French Ecole des Ponts et Chausées facilitated the creation of the Young Water Ambassadors’ network, while local projects in Morocco and Lebanon have been developed in consultation with the countries’ respective water authorities.

However, financing for these small projects in southern Mediterranean countries is hard to obtain. Funding mechanisms within international organizations remain entirely geared towards multi-million-dollar projects, with no infrastructure or staff capacity to deal with requests for small sums.

In addition, funding bodies rarely finance the preliminary soil and water studies required to apply for grants from international institutions. The result is that small NGOs like the Embassy are “caught in a vicious circle”.

“This is a major flaw in the workings of international development organizations,” Prétot says. “The system basically forces you to design huge projects and request huge sums, when often you only need a small amount.”

She argues that there should be an intermediary organization working with bodies like the World Bank and the European Investment Bank to assess small projects and combine them into larger ‘bulk applications’ which are then submitted as a package.

This is exactly what the Embassy of Water has done to obtain funding for the five UMJAE projects, combining “lots of small amounts” to arrive at a large sum that will be taken into consideration by large financiers.

Decision-making tool

The UMJAE’s sixth and arguably most important project is STRATEAU, a software application tool developed by the Embassy to facilitate decision-making processes in the world of water.

Following the development of a prototype in 2009, the young water ambassadors applied the tool in three river basins in France, Lebanon and Morocco. Based on the results of these ‘test runs’ and feedback received at a Union for the Mediterranean meeting of water ministers in Barcelona in 2010, the tool is now being optimized for use in different contexts. The students will present the improved version at the World Water Forum in Marseille in March 2012.

Prétot explains that the idea for STRATEAU was born out of a “personal frustration” she experienced in her work as an administrator on the board of the Seine and Normandie water utility – a frustration echoed by many of her peers – at the huge case files she had to assess in a short period of time without being able to gain clear insight into local conditions.

“I receive a thick file about a €12 million investment needed to treat wastewater from a new factory on the outskirts of a rural community,” she says. “The project looks nice, but I simply don’t have the time to properly assess it, nor do I have access to an economist, a sociologist or an environmental expert to get their opinion.”

STRATEAU, which she describes as a “kind of computer game” allows users to simulate the construction of the factory and see its economic, social and environmental impact on the area. It will thus allow decision-makers to quickly assess the viability of water projects.

“But it is not just a tool for engineers,” Prétot says. “STRATEAU will remain associated with the UMJAE and will form the link between political decision-makers, engineers and technicians, and the UMJAE. This is its added value.”

Six French water agencies, two private-sector companies and the Embassy contributed to funding STRATEAU’s initial design and the current phase of development and fine-tuning.

However, after the final presentation in March 2012, additional funds will be needed to implement the tool in the southern Mediterranean countries and provide training to local engineers in order to apply it.

Prétot underscores the importance of this next phase that will effectively increase the tool’s utility for the Mediterranean region as more countries contribute data and users expand its applications.

“STRATEAU can be compared to Facebook in that sense: it is an interface. It will have no value if no one creates additional input and expands the database. And this will obviously require funding.”

But already today, before STRATEAU’s finalization, the work of the Young Water Ambassadors has strengthened relationships between water experts around the Mediterranean, creating a new dynamic between north and south, and between junior and senior actors in the water arena.

“Water expert meetings and ministerial councils used to be exclusive clubs,” says Prétot. “But in the last two years the mindset has changed. I don’t know if it is because young people have become involved, but the decision makers are all ears. They are listening to the younger generation and to the needs of citizens. The change is extraordinary.”