Anwar Hussain Aryan is on a mission. Once he completes his master’s degree, he wants to return home to Afghanistan and work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He wants to help resolve disputes over water. “My thesis is on conflict and cooperation,” he says. A student of Integrated Water Resources Management, Aryan knew he was on the right path, but a recent two-week summer school program funded by USAID, has equipped him with the skills to help establish cooperation across borders in a region marked by conflict over shared water resources.  

“Both conflict and cooperation can start with water,” he explains. “When you know how the water is used, and how to use it efficiently, then you can understand any conflict and how to resolve it.” 

The summer school program took place at the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers (TIIAME) in Uzbekistan, as part of the USAID-supported Smart Waters project. The project aims to bring together the countries of Central Asia and Afghanistan by creating a network of like-minded water management specialists and policy makers across multiple levels of management. Also, within the framework of Smart Waters, students from Afghanistan and the Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan receive scholarships to complete a two-year master’s degrees at the Kazakh German University in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The degree is aimed at increasing management skills in the region and creating a cadre of future leaders with practical experience.

“Our mission at TIIAME is to achieve sound theoretical knowledge with application in practice,” says TIIAME vice rector for international cooperation, Abdulkhakim Salokhiddinov. According to Salokhiddinov, Water Resources Management consists of many important components. Knowing only the ‘hard sciences’ is not ideal, but neither is knowing the ‘soft sciences’ without a technical background, he says. “It’s like knowing how to drive a car, but never getting behind the wheel.” Practical application and working in laboratories are vital for students to gain insight. In Central Asia, TIIAME is providing experts with that exposure. “No other university in the region has such special and unique laboratory complexes,” says Salokhiddinov. Aryan is not the only one that will benefit from the unique experience. The first summer school took place in 2018 and included 19 students from across Central Asia, 14 more followed in 2019, and about 30 additional students will participate in the next summer school in June 2020.

Lecture topics include a wide array of technical subjects and are combined with practical exercises at the TIIAME laboratory. To understand water saving irrigation technologies, the students visited a recently constructed demonstration site – an orchard complete with drip irrigation technologies installed to test different approaches to water use and conservation.

For Aryan, the highlight of the summer school was the field trip to Termez in southeast Uzbekistan. “The field trip to Termez was my favorite because for the first time, I could see how dams are  constructed and how water is being used.” It was an eye opener. “Before, I thought that Uzbekistan uses too much of the region’s water, but now I can see that they don’t waste it. They are using it very efficiently – more than what I’ve seen in other countries in the region,” he adds.

For Aryan’s future and other summer school students, this insight is invaluable. Understanding shared water issues is particularly important in Central Asia and Afghanistan. Over 200 river basins in the region are transboundary and are shared by two or more countries. In general, countries upstream use water largely for hydropower generation, while countries downstream use it predominantly for agriculture. This creates an opportunity for collaboration but has also led to disagreements and conflict across borders. In order to improve the situation, it’s integral that the next generation of water managers are adequately equipped with both theoretical and practical knowledge. This is exactly what the summer school hopes to achieve.

“It’s pointless to work on a thesis about conflict and cooperation in water without practical data on the amount of water used, how it is used, if there are any alternatives and if, for example, a user is using more than they need. You can only see the big picture once you have combined all of these practical aspects.” For Aryan, the benefits of the summer school are clear. “We need to know the basics of how water resources and infrastructure works, before we can understand how to manage it.”

The USAID-supported Smart Waters project is implemented by the Regional Environmental Centre for Central Asia (CAREC).

~ Petro Kotze for CAREC