November 2018

Wetskills Team member Chrysoula: Young AIWW Ambassador

(source: www.amsterdamiww.com) Chrysoula Papacharalampou, as Wetskills Team member (joining Wetskills-The Netherlands in 2015, supervisor of Wetskills-United Kingdom 2017 in Bath and preparing Wetskills event for Wetskills-The Netherlands 2019 during the AIWW) was awarded the title of Young Professional Ambassador of AIWW in 2017. She is one of the speakers at the AIWW Summit 2018 (in Rotterdam on 15 November 2018), dedicated to inspire us about ‘water identities’, which reflect on the human side of the current water issues. Water identities Chrysoula: ‘Your water identity is the way a person is shaped by aspects of life they didn’t determine themselves, but which do influence the way we think about water.’ Chrysoula moved from Greece to the UK, had to reshape her thinking about water and had to reshape it again after her move to the Netherlands. ‘People in the Netherlands live with water. It made me aware of the existence of water identities and how...

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Winning case in Kyrgyzstan: Sustainable financing of the irrigation sector

‘Producing electricity to provide finances for water infrastructure by reinvesting money to local farmers, instead of import and loans’, grabs the core of the concept for financing the irrigation sector in Kyrgyzstan, announced by the five-headed jury on 26thof October in Bishkek. The winning concept is developed in the two-week pressure-cooker Wetskills by the team ‘Watek’, consisting of Jibek Turgunbaeva (Kyrgyz National Agrarian University (KNAU)), Zarina Kaarova (Kyrgyz State University of Construction, Transport and Architecture), Jamalidin Sadridin Uulu (Kyrgyz Turkish Manas University) and Bas Merten (Wageningen University, Netherlands).One of their important aspects was to set up crowdfunding to create ownership for farmers and generate more transparency due to many investors international, national and to provide the diaspora of Kyrgyzstan with a way to support their country.   As the team tells in their inspiring 2-minute pitch: ‘We will take this opportunity to invest in our electricity and agriculture so that Kyrgyzstan can...

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