With grant funding from the Bank-Netherlands Water Partnership Program (BNWPP), the World Bank held a workshop on Water Users Association (WUA) development in the CIS from October 1 to 6, 2007 in the Kyrgyz Republic, with participants from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. 

The five Central Asia and three South Caucasus countries have on-going or planned World Bank-funded irrigation projects that include Water Users Association (WUA) development, while ADB and other donors have projects in some of the countries as well.  In several of the countries, where WUA establishment has been most advanced and most successful, the process of WUA formation is going through a number of stages: (i) formation of informal WUAs; (ii) formation of legal WUAs under some type of law; (iii) restructuring WUAs to clearly separate governance and management; and (iv) WUAs federating to achieve economies of scale to justify purchasing their own maintenance equipment as well as moving upstream and assuming O&M responsibility for entire secondary and primary canals.  Other countries have either lagged behind or developed WUAs in slightly different,
less participatory ways.

Based on their experience, each of the countries has learned valuable lessons with respect to the development and sustainability of WUAs.  The purpose of the Workshop on Lessons Learned in Developing Sustainable WUAs and Forming WUA Federations was to draw on the experiences of the eight participating countries in forming these associations to discuss lessons learned concerning
WUAs and to better understand the process as countries move from the first stage to the fourth stage.  As each country has unique experiences, all participants learned a number of lessons as well as contributing to a better understanding of the process of establishing sustainable WUAs and WUA Federations.

The workshop was organized as a Round Table, encouraging open discussion with the overall objective of sharing lessons learned related to the sustainability of WUAs.  In addition, participants had an opportunity to discuss second generation concerns, including the need for specific WUA laws as well as overall water laws and steps for implementing plans to organize WUA Federations to gradually take over O&M responsibilities for primary, secondary and inter-farm delivery canals.  Institutional relationships between State Departments of Water Resources and WUAs and WUA Federations were also included in Workshop discussions.