World Resources Institute is partnering with the Kigali Resilience Unit, the Resilient Cities Network (RCN), Arup, the Resilience Shift (tRS), Bantu Design and others to provide the city government with the necessary decision support frameworks and capacity building mechanism to identify and advance priority urban water resilience interventions. The Africa Urban Water Resilience Program (AUWR) aims to address water risks and vulnerabilities in 6 African cities towards a water resilient recovery post COVID-19.  Bantu’s role is to facilitate the implementation of the City Water Resilience Approach (CWRA), a multi-stakeholder planning process, in the city of Kigali in close partnership with national and city stakeholders.  The approach helps stakeholders to understand the city-region water system, shocks, and stresses, diagnose the water resilience and vulnerabilities and works to develop a collective action plan. 

The city of Kigali has identified adaptive water governance as a priority area of intervention to ensure water and sanitation access in its soon to be released Kigali Integrated Development Strategy (IDS) 2018-2024 and Kigali Resilience Roadmap.  Kigali’s Resilience Roadmap proposes to conduct the CWRA and develop an Urban Water Resilience Action Plan.  The CWRA is a five-step process: mapping the city-region water system and identifying shocks, stresses, stakeholders, infrastructural assets, governance processes and interdependencies; assessing the city’s current practices in accordance with the CWRF, through which existing strengths and weaknesses are identified through stakeholder engagement; developing an action plan in which future actions for interventions are developed based on the holistic evaluation of anticipated benefits, costs and prioritization of key and bankable projects; implementation of the action plan; and evaluation and learning to adapt.