- The Blue Heart of Africa (BHA) Initiative unites freshwater work across Africa, to build partnerships and projects that deliver real progress.
Environmentalists have camped in Uganda for a week long retreat discussing and offering solutions to challenges affecting fresh water sources in Africa under the Blue Heart of Africa initiative.
The closed door meeting being held at Protea Hotel in Entebbe, north east of capital Kampala is being attended by stakeholders from twelve African countries including Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Madagascar, Rwanda, Tunisia and Egypt.
Other participants include the donor community from Europe, Asia and the Americas.
The Blue Heart of Africa (BHA) Initiative unites freshwater work across Africa, to build partnerships and projects that deliver real progress.
Speaking to reporters at the side-lines of the meeting, Mr. Stuart Orr, the Practice Leader, Freshwater WWF International noted that through the initiative, they seek to look at emerging issues in Africa that "we as WWF could support and work towards."
"The Blue Heart of Africa Initiative’’ focuses on Nature-based solutions and climate adaptation, inland fisheries but also connected to food security, water and sanitation challenges," Mr. Orr added.
He further explained that the initiative also seeks to support African countries to meet national, regional and global commitments towards water security and climate change using a resilience lens, leveraging innovative finance, investing and building with nature, engaging the private sector and protecting vital freshwater biodiversity.
"We are trying to bring attention of water resources which is often missing in the conservation around climate change and the biodiversity crisis especially the species, climate and fresh water and make that connection to livelihoods, food security and other issues that are of importance to governments".
Mr. David Dduli, the Country Director, World Wide Fund for Nature Uganda Country Office noted that fresh water sources are under significant risk and intense pressure—citing a sharp increase in demand due to high population growth and increasing agriculture/industrial activities, demand from rapid urbanization with inadequate governance strategies and innovation.
"The Blue Heart of Africa Initiative seeks to unify freshwater conservation activities across African landscapes and across stakeholders by providing an overarching framework that addresses Africa’s key freshwater challenges," Mr. Duli said.
"We need to make sure that some of the government development or initiatives programmes that are coming in don't encroach or affect negatively our water basis. It has to be sustained," he said.
"The resilienceness of fresh water is ex-abated by the climate vulnerability. We have serious impact on Agriculture that we don't have enough water to sustain our agricultural productivity or the food production and our land productivity has gone down," he said, noting that this has impacted on the provision of labour and jobs for the young people.
Agriculture employs about 80% of the country’s people, with conservationist reasoning that "if it is affected by not having enough water for irrigation, it’s such something to worry about".