The Environmental Protection of International River Basins project began in 2012, and has been running for 57 months contributing to the achievement of the overarching project objective - improving water quality in the trans-boundary river basins of the wider Black Sea region and Belarus. During the course of this project, technical experts have worked in close partnership with our counterparts from different beneficiary institutions. This collaboration has proven to be effective, and one that we have truly appreciated, and would furthermore recommend to future implementers. The success of our work was possible with the new extension, which provided the opportunity to explore further areas to deepen capacity which were not possible under the original project’s timeframe and budget.
The time extension allowed our team to build further upon their four years of quality work, and widen the impact of this project. It also provided more time to deeply embed systems to guarantee the legacy of what we’ve achieved, and to properly hand it over to future implementation partners. The final Steering Committee Meeting was held on the 19 – 20 September in Kiev, Ukraine. The meeting marks the bridging point between the Human Dynamics led EPIRB project and the beginning of the European Union Water Initiative for Eastern European partnership countries. The event had two aims. Primarily, in taking stock of the results achieved through EPIRB support in the reform of water resource management, and then to establish feasible outcome indicators and priority activities for the upcoming EUWI PLUS project.