WLE Ganges Regional Forum

Background

The Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) on Water Land and Ecosystems (WLE) takes a research for development approach to address challenges in four major regions: the Ganges; the Nile-East Africa; the Volta-Niger; and the Greater Mekong. In the Ganges River basin, WLE has been working on five projects since December 2014 to improve the food security, nutrition and livelihoods of farmers in a variety of landscapes, from mountains, to plains, to river deltas.

Of these, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) is leading the project on ‘Reviving springs and providing access to solar powered irrigation pumps through community based water use planning with multiple approaches to solving agricultural water problems in the mid-hills and Terai in India and Nepal’ and contributing to the project on ‘The irrigation-hydropower nexus in the Ganges headwaters’ which is led by the University of Arizona.

This workshop will bring together the Ganges focal region partners to reflect on the first 18 months of implementation with the following objectives:

Objectives

• to update and reflect upon the progress toward outputs in the last 18 months;
• to find out key scalable messages/technologies/policy recommendations;
• to pin point key research work to be done beyond project period for making it palatable to community, business farm and policy makers;
• and to position and fund the Ganges ecosystem service alliance research from 2017 and future projects.