Consultant ? Freshwater Community of Practice Specialist - Home-based

The Global Environment Facility (GEF)

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) (www.thegef.org) unites 183 member governments—in partnership with international institutions, non-governmental organizations and the private sector—to address global environment issues. An independently operating financial organization, the GEF provides grants for projects related to biodiversity, climate change, international waters, land degradation, the ozone layer and persistent organic pollutants. Since 1991, the GEF has provided US$12.5 billion in grants and leveraged US$58 billion in co-financing for 3,690 projects in 165 developing countries. Through its Small Grants Programme (SGP) the GEF has made more than 20,000 grants totaling about US$1 billion to civil society and community-based organizations.

The GEF International Waters (IW) focal area targets transboundary water systems, such as shared river basins, lakes, groundwater and large marine ecosystems. The IW portfolio comprises 242 projects to date and some US$1.4 billion of GEF grants invested in 149 different countries. This investment has leveraged about US$8.4 billion in co-financing.

GEF IW:LEARN (International Waters Learning Exchange and Resource Network)

Such investments to protect the global environment leverage many invaluable experiences, lessons learned and recommendations for current and future GEF IW projects. The IW focal area has handled knowledge management with the help of a series of global projects titled, “International Waters Learning Exchange and Resources Network”, or IW:LEARN.

IW:LEARN operates as a central hub of information and knowledge sharing and delivers a host of programmatic initiatives for the benefit of the GEF IW portfolio of projects. In pursuit of its global and regional objectives, IW:LEARN seeks to strengthen global portfolio experience sharing and learning, dialogue facilitation, targeted knowledge sharing and replication in order to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of GEF IW projects to deliver tangible results in partnership with other IW initiatives.

More information about GEF IW:LEARN is available at www.iwlearn.net/abt_iwlearn.

The fourth IW:LEARN project (IW:LEARN4) is in the Project Preparation Grant (PPG) phase—a designated period to design and develop the project’s activities. The project proposal received approval from the GEF in May 2014. The PPG phase is planned for completion in late 2014. Outputs during the PPG phase will be utilized to construct the full-sized project document.

The scope of IW:LEARN4 lies in a continued demand for:

Assisting projects in acquiring relevant knowledge related to transboundary waters management in order to improve future project design;Enhancing the understanding and application of GEF IW experiences across the IW portfolio to produce better quality project results;Facilitating the replication and scaling up of good practices in transboundary waters management, resulting in lower costs and improved capacity to address transboundary concerns; andEnsuring that insights generated through project interventions are shared and add value to the IW portfolio and beyond.IW:LEARN4 is divided into five components:Support the harvesting, dissemination and replication of portfolio & partner results, data and experience;Share knowledge across projects and partners (through dialogue processes and face-to-face capacity building) to advance transboundary water management;Expand global freshwater Communities of Practice, to advance conjunctive management of surface, ground and marine waters and partner with new enterprises on initiatives to better manage international waters;Promote GEF IW results, tools & best practice to the non-GEF community to increase awareness, replication, scalability and sustainability of GEF IW investments; andLaunch programmatic tools to improve portfolio performance and sustain project interventions.

Per Component 3 of the proposed project, IW:LEARN will mobilize external partnerships to work together for improved learning and knowledge management through enhanced global surface and ground freshwater Communities of Practice (CoPs) to impact results and advance conjunctive management. CoPs act as a catalytic coalition among GEF IW projects, transboundary commissions and non-GEF partners to promote learning that meets project-level priorities. CoPs are designed to build on existing knowledge from inside and outside the GEF IW Portfolio, build regional and country partnerships, connect scientists to decision-makers and be responsive to the learning needs of the GEF IW projects. They aim to illuminate good practice, spawn new ideas for products and services, enable accelerated learning, connect learning to action and improve organizational performance.

In particular, IW:LEARN will address (1) GEF5 Strategic Objective 3 to support foundational capacity building, portfolio learning and targeted research needs for joint, ecosystem-based management of transboundary water systems; and (2) Draft GEF6 IW Programs 2.1 and 2.2 by engaging a new set of partners. These partners include global NGO’s and transboundary commissions, collectively dubbed the Global Network to Advance Integrated River Basin Management, established in March 2013 to coordinate and jointly deliver freshwater capacity-building activities on the basis of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The MoU has been co-signed by the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River, the International Network of Basin Organizations, the International River Foundation, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, IW:LEARN’s previous phase, the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund. The MoU provides a framework for a voluntary, cooperative, and committed effort by the organizations to work on circles of activities that build synergies between and among the organizations, and helps leverage resources to support more river basins globally develop and implement IWRM. The Project will also work with existing partners of the previous phase, including Global Water Partnership and the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization to advance conjunctive management. The expanded partnership represents a deepening of the proposed project’s baseline, as well as significant opportunities to leverage the work of the GEF IW portfolio through partnerships.

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