Obituary Henk Post

Last weekend, after a short illness, our colleague Henk Post passed away at the age of 68. This sudden loss has been a major shock to his family, friends, partners and colleagues.

Henk has been the driving force behind the projects of World Waternet in Burkina Faso. At the end of the 1970s, Henk built water reservoirs in that country and met his wife there. In 1986, he started working at the predecessor of the Dutch water authority Drents Overijsselse Delta. There, he kicked-off a project in cooperation with a Burkinabe water authority in 2011. The Dutch water authorities Hunze en Aa’s, Aa en Maas and World Waternet joined this endeavor in 2014. Integrated water management and Henk Post were inextricably linked in Burkina Faso. Henk knew everyone, from Ministers to water experts.

In 2020, Henk retired. But full of ambition, he wished to continue implementing the large-scale project ‘Eau, CLE et Developpement Durable’ (ECDD). World Waternet hired him especially for this task. He installed a local team and opened the first oversees World Waternet office in Ouagadougou, the country's capital.

Henk made major contributions to improving the water suppply and the greening of Burkina Faso:

• He set up two EU-financed projects with water authority Nakanbe, with the aim to strengthen integrated water management.
• He kicked-off the Faso Koom and Blue Deal programmes for capacity building and knowledge sharing between five Burkinabe water authorities.
• He was the founding father of the Develop2Build project, with the goal to rehabilitate nine water reservoirs.

These efforts and results did not go by unnoticed. Henk he was knighted in recognition of his services to Burkina Faso by the Minister of Water in 2019.

With Henk, we lose a dedicated and ambitious colleague. A dynamic, warm-hearted and accessible person, who was always in for a chat. Who always put the emphasis on developing local knowledge and expertise.

His last words were: ‘I was not finished yet’. The team of World Waternet will continue his life’s work. Our thoughts are with Henk's wife and children during this painful time.