Achieving and maintaining water security is increasingly challenging under current climatic variability and projected changes in climate especially for vulnerable ecosystems and communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, there is a need to identify pathways to integrate the science-based understanding of increasing climate variability and climate impacts on water security into mitigation, adaptation policies and practices. In collaboration with the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation, the US Army Corps of Engineers, Deltares and the Dutch Ministry of Water and Infrastructure; UNESCO and the International Centre for Integrated Water Resources Management have recently developed a key publication on the ‘Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA): Collaborative Water Resources Planning for an Uncertain Future’. The CRIDA approach provides guidelines to assess water security vulnerabilities due to climate variability and change, and gives guidance on the development of adaptation pathways for robust water resources management.

 Building further on these efforts, CRIDA case studies are needed to demonstrate the versatility of the approach under different contexts and to adjust the developed tools and methodologies to the local situations. If well applied, CRIDA tools can enhance the path towards resilient societies in SSA that are water secure. Therefore, a capacity building workshop was jointly organized by the UNESCO Regional Office for Eastern Africa, Makerere University (MAK) and the Ministry of Water and Environment of Uganda at the Water Resources Institute (WRI) in Entebbe, Uganda from 9 to 13 September 2019 to train key stakeholders on the different aspects of the CRIDA approach and to move towards the identification of potential case studies for demonstrative purposes. The training was organized in the framework of IHP (International Hydrological Programme) VIII, which addresses Water Security Responses to Local, Regional, and Global Challenges. 

The workshop also served as a stakeholder meeting to identify the potential for developing full-scale project proposals for the semi-arid regions of Kenya and Uganda. This is particularly important as those regions have been suffering from severe water insecurity over the last decades. The evaluation of the use of CRIDA in such a context is therefore highly relevant, and builds further on initial efforts that already started in the region.

 Participants expressed their appreciation for the workshop and testify of being enhanced with the skill and knowledge to apply CRIDA in making climate-informed decisions about water supply infrastructure.