Challenges and Success Stories for Sustainable Water Management in Mena Region

Water sector in the MENA region faces many challenges that hinder its social and economic development. For this purpose, many workshops were organized and held by EXCEED-SWINDON last 10 years in order to discuss these challenges and to find the best solutions to overcome or at least to minimize their long term negative impacts. This paper is a short review of more than 20 papers, which were published in the EXCEED book series “Water Perspectives in Emerging Countries” from 2015 to 2019. This review presents many challenges and some examples for success stories for good water management in the MENA Region. The challenges could be classified as natural, social, political, technical, financial, governance and institutional, and trans-boundary ones. Natural challenges include frequent droughts and climate change; social challenges include high population growth, social misconceptions that impact water use behavior, and corruption. Technical challenges refer to low water use efficiency, especially in agricultural and domestic sectors. Policy challenges include poor allocation among the different competing demands as most of available water resources are allocated to the agricultural sector, and poor cropping practices in the agricultural sector. Economic challenges include lack of funds and low level of cost recovery in most of the MENA countries. Governance and institutional challenges refer to the lack of effective coordination and unclear lines of responsibilities among the different governmental bodies in charge of water resources management. The success stories for good water management are taken here from Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco. Finally, many conclusions and recommendations from this review could be driven.