The MEKROU project
The “Water for Growth and Poverty Reduction in the Mékrou transboundary River Basin (Burkina Faso, Benin and Niger)" project, known as MEKROU project, is a competitive project implemented by the JRC and the Global Water Partnership (GWP) through an Administrative Arrangement with DG DEVCO (ending December 2017).
As part of the European Commission's Agenda for Change, the MEKROU project aims to support Economic Green Growth and Poverty Reduction in the three African countries in order to foster peace and security and to ensure continued water supply to developing areas.
As part of the project, the JRC and local and regional partners have developed the e-NEXUS integrated operational decision support tool. Based on a Water-Agriculture-Climate-Ecosystem nexus approach, e-NEXUS integrates several tools for modelling and analysing climate variability and change, hydrology and agriculture, to generate optimal integrated scenarios. It helps policymakers and technicians to analyse and assess the impact of different resource management scenarios in a context of climate variability, climate change (which is particularly relevant to Africa), food security and water allocation, taking environmental constraints into account. In so doing, e-NEXUS helps identify a set of optimal solutions and scenarios according to specific socio-economic and political constraints, objectives and targets defined by policymakers. These scenarios and optimal solutions have helped define the Strategic Development Frame of this transboundary basin and feed the Regional Investment Plans.
Outcome of the meeting and next steps
The results of this meeting and the different strategic documents were validated during the MEKROU steering committee (25-27 September in Ouagadougou), made up of high representatives of the different ministries and services of the three countries, the Niger Basin Authority (NBA), the JRC and the GWP. The e-NEXUS tool was adopted as an operational decision support tool for the region and will be installed in the three countries, the Niger Environmental Observatory of the Niger Basin Authority, and the AGRHYMET premises in late November 2017.