WATDEV Regional Workshop Held in Kenya to Validate Basin-Scale Water Management Scenarios

The Climate Smart Water Management and Sustainable Development for Food and Agriculture in East Africa (WATDEV) project, funded by the European Union, in the framework of the DeSIRA Initiative, advanced its regional engagement efforts with a Regional Workshop held in Malindi, Kenya, on 17 November 2025. The event was organized by the local partner, Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), in collaboration with ASARECA, CIHEAM-Bari, and the Tana River County Government.

The workshop brought together regional planners, researchers, decision makers, ministry officials, technical experts, stakeholders, and project partners to validate the Best Management Practices (BMPs) scenarios developed for basin-scale application in Kenya, ensuring they reflect local realities, community priorities, and support long-term climate-resilient development.

The day opened with remarks by Mr. Moses Odeke, Interim Head of Programs of ASARECA, who described the workshop as a defining moment in the implementation of the WATDEV Project. This was followed by Dr. Gaetano Ladisa, WATDEV Project Manager at CIHEAM-Bari, highlighting the significance of the workshop as a key moment for jointly validating BMPs at the basin level. This workshop - he said - represents a key step in moving from localized assessments to basin-wide planning, marking a transition toward integrated, evidence-based, and participatory water and land management strategies. Dr. Alice Murage, Deputy Director General for Crops at KALRO, emphasized the project’s strong participatory approach. She affirmed that WATDEV has fully engaged stakeholders in co-creation to enhance ownership, applicability, and long-term sustainability of the proposed solutions.

The workshop was officially inaugurated by Hon. Mwanajuma Hiribae, CECM for Agriculture in Tana River County. She underscored the region’s vulnerability to floods and droughts, which continue to disrupt agricultural productivity and food security. She welcomed the WATDEV initiative as a timely effort to strengthen climate resilience and sustainable agriculture, and pledged the County’s full commitment and support.

A key speech address by Dr. Jacopo Tavassi, AICS–EU Portfolio Coordinator at AICS Cairo, set the tone for the day. He stressed that the workshop represents a critical convergence of scientific modelling, policy dialogue, and field experience, helping determine what can truly be scaled and adopted by farming communities. He highlighted that sustainability must be paired with scalability, reaffirming the need for technically sound and socially acceptable BMPs. Dr. Tavassi also emphasized AICS’s ongoing commitment to support WATDEV, noting that although much of AICS’s contribution happens behind the scenes, it remains essential, from audit and compliance to ensure transparency and accountability, to monitoring and evaluation that document progress and learning, and communication efforts that make evidence and results visible and credible for all.

Participants also received an update on project progress from Ms. Concetta Bianco, WATDEV Project Coordinator at AICS Cairo, who presented recent achievements and upcoming implementation plans. Her presentation reinforced the value of multi-country collaboration in generating shared climate-smart water management solutions.

Dr. Jantiene Baartman from ISRIC later outlined the methodology used to simulate BMPs/scenarios at the basin level. This provided participants with a clear understanding of how previous stakeholder inputs, collected during case-study engagement activities, were translated into robust modelling outputs. 

Following these presentations, the workshop moved into the core of the workshop, focused on the technical results of modelling BMPs. Participants were introduced by Dr. Aymen Sawassi, from CIHEAM-Bari, to the outcomes of the simulated BMPs/scenarios, with particular emphasis on the two key BMPs in Kenya: The Agroforestry, including the expansion of mango trees and the use of hedgerow trees as windbreaks, and the Water Users’ Association (WUA). An open Q&A ensured that all stakeholders shared a common understanding of the technical implications and modelling assumptions behind each scenario. Dr. Luuk Fleskens from ISRIC complemented the simulation results with the economic assessment of the BMPs, conducted through the post-processing analysis.

KALRO’s and Tana River County’s staff facilitated the interactive group exercise that engaged participants in discussions, analysis, and refinement of the proposed scenarios, identifying enabling conditions, feasibility considerations, and potential barriers to implementation. This participatory validation generated crucial basin-specific information that would not be accessible through modelling alone.

To complement the qualitative dialogue with the participating organizations, Ms. Silvia Lecci from CIHEAM Bari conducted a survey on water management policy improvements. This survey is intended to examine the stakeholders’ perception of the direct or indirect contribution that the modelling toolbox can have on policy and/or governance models improvement in the field of water management in agriculture in Kenya. 

The day concluded with a synthesis of findings, outlining the key recommendations, scenario refinements, and priorities emerging from the participatory discussions and engagement. A roadmap was presented for integrating stakeholder inputs into updated basin-level simulations under the WATDEV framework.

Overall, the Regional Workshop in Kenya represented a critical milestone for WATDEV. By combining advanced modelling with participatory validation, the event ensured that basin-scale BMP scenarios are not only technically robust but also socially grounded, institutionally relevant, and aligned with real implementation conditions. This collaborative process strengthens the WATDEV modelling toolbox and paves the way for more climate-resilient and sustainable agricultural water systems across Eastern Africa.

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