Strengthening GWOPA’s impact across the Water Cycle: Insights from the GWOPA Assembly & the UN Urban Forum 2024
15 November 2024With the UN COP 2024, in full swing, we took a moment to discuss and reflect upon two very important conferences that took place this month. We are of course talking about the UN-Habitat GWOPA Assembly (2nd -3rd November) and the UN-Habitat World Urban forum 12 (4th-8th November). We had the chance to sit down and speak with our CEO, Frodo van Oostveen, and Project Manager, Arnout van Balen, who attended these conferences, to better understand the direction in which international water cycle management is heading.
From left to right: Frodo van Oostveen; Massaba Keita; Arnout van Balen.
48hrs UN-Habitat GWOPA in collective action
As the name suggests, GWOPA is a global alliance for Water Operators’ Partnerships (WOPs), where the core aim is to improve access to drinking water, sanitation & hygiene (WASH) through knowledge exchange and capacity building. The 2024 GWOPA assembly marked the beginning of a new chapter, a chapter about Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), filled with new partners, new leadership, and renewed ambitions for the coming 5 years.
The GWOPA assembly focused on three key goals: (a) developing a strong strategy for 2030, (b) sharing successes, and failures to facilitate future projects, and (c) welcoming new partners and steering committee members. Leading the assembly programme was Dr Rose Kaggwa, GWOPA’s new chair, who ensured every voice and topic received attention.
In a brief discussion with Frodo van Oostveen, a recent addition to the Steering Committee and CEO of World Waternet, he shared his key takeaways from the assembly and outlined four main insights for the future of GWOPA:
Broadening the Water Cycle Partnership
Let's expand our role as Water Operators to bring in more partners across the entire water cycle. After all, water comes from the catchment—so we need to focus both upstream and downstream, adopting approaches like Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH).
Building a People-Centered Workforce
We also need to be more human-centered in developing our workforce. This means ensuring decent working conditions, attracting and keeping talent, and sharing resources across the alliance; David Boys (PSI (You are leaving this website)) truly inspired us with concrete and crucial (policy) interventions needed within our WOPs. We must create learning platforms and involve more urban planners, youth, and community members to drive real engagement.
Strengthening GWOPA's role within the UN family
Strengthening GWOPA’s role within the UN family is also essential. Water Operator Partnerships (WOPs) are critical to delivering health, food, and other vital services through water and sanitation. It’s crucial that GWOPA advocates for an allocation of resources towards peer-to-peer capacity building – just 1 % - within large-scale infrastructure investments for sustainable impact.
Evolving the WOP story into tangible Impact
Finally, it’s time to regenerate our WOP story, shifting from just capacity building and knowledge sharing to tangible action and impact. Let’s spotlight water utility, catchment and city leaders, expand our vision to include the circular economy, and position WOPs as a platform for better performance and investment.
Frodo's mindmap from the Cairo forums.
48 hours at the World Urban Forum 12 – A home where water flows
The theme “It All Starts at Home” took on new meaning as we discussed what makes a house a home. From Cairo, GWOPA stressed that “home” should mean reliable access to safe drinking water—a vision that WOPs can help achieve by bridging resources and expertise across regions. In partnership with development banks like the European Investment Bank and the Asian Development Bank, we continue to promote WOPs as a high-impact and value, low-cost and efficient investment for water security.
We spoke to Arnout van Balen about the key highlights from this event.
Making waves with EUWOP: Phase two in Mali
"We participated in the World Urban Forum 12 (WUF) to witness the launch of the EU-WOP phase 2 on the 5th of November. In phase one, we focused on reducing non-revenue water, and we achieved a 15% reduction in three Malian cities, in partnership with SOMAGEP (Mali), ONEE (Marocco) and Waternet (Netherlands). Expanding upon the themes of phase one, namely non-revenue water, enhancing climate resilience, and improving social inclusion through strengthened water access, phase 2 offers us an opportunity to further develop our current WOPs and start new partnerships. Together we can, stronger together!"
Declared World Waternet Project Manager Arnout van Balen.
Signing off from Cairo: Ready for the next wave
With the conferences in Cairo behind us, the GWOPA family now moves forward with greater unity and purpose as we look toward UN-COP 2024 and,of course, the 2025 global WOPs congress in Bonn. To conclude we would like to send our biggest compliments and appreciation to the GWOPA secretariat for hosting us and linking the assembly to the World Urban Forum. Events like these unite diverse sectors, generations, water operators, authorities, and cities—connections that drive meaningful progress in addressing water and climate challenges.