Ready for the Fourth GEF IW Conference?

Dear GEF IW Partners and Conference Participants:

Greetings from GEF IW:LEARN -- and thank you for your plans to participate in our Fourth GEF International Waters Conference (IWC4). Based on your feedback from previous ones, this Cape Town conference is a an active learning conference reformulated and distinct form all previous GEF IW Conferences in several important ways:

First and foremost, our agenda has rapidly evolved to address your biggest challenges. Over 90 registrants have already identified 175 challenges you face in making your International Waters projects successful. I personally have been analyzing and organizing these challenges to ensure our time together in Cape Town is directly useful to you in overcoming common challenges.

Second, our format offers numerous opportunities for you to actively seek and obtain the answers you need. As the agenda and session descriptions show, participatory, small group discussions predominate our IWC4 sessions. We're using various interactive formats to help you find knowledge you need, share your own applicable knowledge, and spontaneously collaborate to solve similar problems among GEF IW projects around the world. We'll also introduce new ways of learning from each other, such as project clinics, world cafe and open space, and an innovation marketplace -- some of which you could then adapt to facilitate learning among your own partners and stakeholders.

Third, our conference celebrates the real achievements, innovations and impacts by GEF projects towards realizing our shared vision of a time when sharing the perpetual benefits of our water planet fully transcends our political boundaries. In the spirit of our "regional" days of past conferences, your program committee has:

• invited several projects from our African host region to share their achievements in a lively and inspirational manner, other projects to present documentaries of their accomplishments;
  
• welcomed all participants to help us adapt their greatest innovations at our competitively-judged innovation marketplace exhibition, and to organize your own "participant-led sessions" as you see fit on the fourth day of our conference;
  
• incorporated insights from our local project host, from Benguela Current (BCLME), and other advanced and soon-to-graduate projects, like the Danube River, into agenda delivery.
  

This is not a PowerPoint presentation-driven conference. Instead, IWC4 features plentiful opportunities for active learning from one another, spontaneous collaborative discussions, and direct transfer of practical knowledge among dozens of GEF-supported partnerships around the world. 

Finally, our 6 conference themes have been selected to serve as focuses for ongoing learning across the GEF IW community:

1. Good IW Governance and Institutions: how to promote good governance and build institutions to promote transboundary waters management.
2. GEF IW Policies and Procedures: examination of emerging GEF policies and procedures pertinent to IW projects and their partners.
3. Financing and Sustaining IW Partnerships: ongoing mechanisms to financially support GEF IW projects throughout their project life cycle, and indefinitely thereafter.
4. IW Scientific and Technical Tools: innovative and effective scientific and technical tools for IW management, e.g.,  SAP implementation, constructed wetlands, and economic valuation.
5. Measuring IW Impacts and Results: monitoring and evaluation of impacts and results in GEF IW projects.
6. Learning Among IW Projects: opportunities for GEF IW partnerships to learn good practices from one another.

To this end, each of the theme titles above links to a web log, or "blog," on the IW:LEARN Web site where GEF IW partners are posting insights and inquiries regarding each of these themes. We invite you to examine and provide your own perspectives* on these blog pages now, during the conference and even after you return home. You can also subscribe to receive email or news of new blog postings, using tools on the right side of each blog page.

For those of you eager to learn more details about the conference, I encourage you to visit links to detailed information on our IWC4 conference Web site's agenda page.
Information there includes the agenda-at-glance, an orientation packet for participants, session descriptions, and the list of your own "challenges" as you provided them upon your registration.

The Fourth GEF IW Conference, in fact GEF IW:LEARN as a whole, exist to ensure your IW projects can learn from one another, adapt and transfer good practices and jointly address and overcome common IW challenges. Thus, our success depends on you: you own leadership, curiosity, and goodwill in expressing your needs from others and your unique insights for others. Thus, we encourage every one of you to approach this conference as a rare opportunity to simultaneously learn, inform and advance international waters management in our respective regions and around the world.

I wish you the very best in your preparation and travel to Cape Town, and throughout our most interactive and enjoyable GEF IW Conference ever.

Kind regards,

Dann Sklarew

* For those unfamiliar with blogs, please see instructions at: http://www.iwlearn.net/iw-help/help/how-to/working-with-the-blog