A two-day sub-regional workshop grouping stakeholders from the six member States of the Lake Chad Basin Commission opened yesterday in Yaounde.

Stakeholders of the Lake Chad Basin Commission drawn from all the six member States, yesterday March 25, 2015, began sharing best-practices on the “Lake Chad Preservation: Contribution to the Lake Chad Development Strategy” project whose third component consists of reinforcing the Lake Chad Water Charter. The two-day get-together according to the Coordinator of the Project, Ahmed Sedick, is to permit Lake Chad Basin Commission and partners such as the International Water Office (IOWater) and the French Global Environment Facility to share experiences and reinforce the putting in place of a governance policy for the management of trans-boundary water resources.

The Lake Chad Water Charter which was adopted by the Conference of Heads of State and Government of the Lake Chad Basin Commission in 2012, targets to help improve the living environment of the local inhabitants especially by combating further reduction of the Lake’s surface area. “Since 1970s the surface area has reduced a lot from 10 to one coefficient proportion. So, it’s very important to manage this resource because it is very much less than before and the people around the Lake Basin suffer from that”, Deputy General Manager of the International Office for Water, Christophe Brachet stated. The Yaounde workshop, he added, will permit participants to learn good practices from other institutions such as Niger Basin Authority, Senegal Basin Authority, and Congo Basin Commission amongst others which all have practices that can be very useful to others.

At the end of the workshop, Brachet held, far reaching recommendations to reinforce exchanges between the Lake Chad Basin Commission, the Economic Community for Central African States (CEMAC) Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS) and the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) on the good management of trans-border water resources.