SUMMARY:
The "Good Water Neighbors" (GWN) project implemented by EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East is supported by a $530,949 grant from USAID for the period September 2007 to September 2009.
The project is implemented in 13 Palestinian and Israeli cross-border communities. Each community is partnered with a neighboring community on the other side of the border/political divide.
The project utilizes the mutual dependence on shared water resources as a basis for developing dialogue and cooperation. In each community, field staff members work in close partnership with youth, adults and municipalities to create awareness of their own and their neighboring community’s water and environment reality.
By undertaking concrete activities, highly relevant to the needs of the communities involved, the GWN project aims to promote common understanding of water and environmental issues and to build trust between communities as the basis for Israeli/Palestinian conflict resolution and peace building. EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East received the 2008 Heroes of the Environment Award from Time Magazine for their strategy of environmental activism to foster peace.
Key Program Highlights:
• Hundreds of youth learn through the “WaterCare” program (based on a text book written by Palestinian and Israeli teachers) about the shared nature of water resources and therefore the need for cooperation.
• Youth participate in dozens of activities as “Water Trustees” learning about environmental hazards in their community and cross-border water problems in particular.
• Israeli and Palestinian youth participate in joint ecological building workshops, learning skills that they then use to implement eco-projects in their own communities.
• Water conservation projects built (or being built) in each of the participating communities, including ecological gardens, reconstructed wetlands (treating grey water), and rainwater harvesting systems.
• Hundreds of “Neighbors Paths” tours have been carried out. These paths highlight the natural and cultural heritage of each one of the “Good Water Neighbor” communities and teach the visitors about the community’s water resources both in the past and in the present. Special focus is given to the interdependent nature of the water resource in regards to the neighboring/ partnering community.
• Mayors met to discuss common environmental projects and successfully leveraged additional support for specific projects such as the removal of olive mill waste from (Palestinian) Tulkarem area olive mills into the (Israeli) Emek Hefer Regional Council’s area, where better treatment of olive waste was offered; involvement of UNDP/Japan in funding the connection of sewage systems between (Palestinian) Baka el Sharkia and (Israeli) Baka el Gharbia; and French NGO investment in the sewage problems in Wadi Fukin. |
