Regional cooperation topic of focus at Amman workshop on water scarcity

AMMAN — The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) on Wednesday hosted experts and key players from businesses and organisations in the field of water management at a workshop in Amman. 

The workshop, held under DAAD’s Clusters of Scientific Innovation in the Middle East and North Africa (COSIMENA) project, was carried out by COSIMENA, the German-Jordanian University (GJU) and DAAD’s regional offices in Cairo and Amman. 

“COSIMENA started in 2017 and is financed by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany,” Isabell Mering, director of the DAAD Regional Office Cairo, told The Jordan Times. 

The goal of the workshop was to find solutions to water supply abundance, access and safety, shed light on water resource management research in the MENA region, identify the role of international development and potential support plans, as well as encourage networking and collaboration.

“Water is not a problem for Jordan alone or Egypt alone. It can only be solved in the region. And scientists, of course, should be on the forefront of collaboration and they should, of course, integrate industry, the ministries, lawmakers, etc, in order to find a solution for this regional problem,” head of DAAD’s information centre in Amman, Gabriele von Fircks, told The Jordan Times. 

The decision to carry out the workshop in Amman was partly due to DAAD’s cooperation with the GJU, said Manar Fayyad, president of the GJU, adding that water scarcity is “a problem that we all suffer from in this region”.

“This workshop gives important insight, [into] what has already been done in the field of water and what can be done,” Mering said, noting that this includes reaching out to the general population. “The water topic is not only a research-based issue that we can tackle closed [away] at home or at universities. The topic of water is connected to other topics as well, as we heard today, to food, to pollution, migration. These are also issues that can only be tackled in cooperation and with crossing borders.”