Introduction to the Association for Water and Rural Development
AWARD is a nonprofit organization specializing in multidisciplinary, participatory, research-based project implementation aimed at addressing sustainability, equity, and poverty issues in natural resource management. Our focus is primarily on integrated and adaptive water resources management, livelihoods, and climate change-related risks. We collaborate with other organizations to develop strong professional networks in civil society, government agencies, and private enterprise, aiming to lay the groundwork for robust and sustainable development policy and practice that builds resilience in a complex world.
Vision
Our vision is to contribute to a more sustainable world, particularly in democratic South Africa, where equity and sustainability principles are upheld and strengthened through active civil society participation in wise water and biodiversity stewardship, management, and governance.
Mission
Our mission is to develop, test, and promote new and appropriate ways of managing water and biodiversity to contribute to sustainable futures that uphold the dignity of all. We seek to do this through:
Principles
AWARD works in a principled way to:
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think across disciplines, boundaries and systems;
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merge considerations from environmental, technical, and social perspectives;
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design practical interventions to address the vulnerability of people and ecosystems; and, in so doing, support robust development of policy and practice.
Organisational history
AWARD’s genesis lies in a number of applied research programmes implemented by the University of the Witwatersrand (commonly known as Wits University), beginning in 1989, when Wits established a multi-disciplinary mini-campus in Mpumalanga province, called the Wits Rural Facility (WRF). One of the programmes that developed at the WRF in the early 1990s, as South Africa transitioned from apartheid to democracy, was the Water Information Project (WIP). In the mid-1990s, a programme was launched that integrated the WIP with a series of village water projects, which led to the formation of AWARD as an independent, non-profit company in 1998. Over the next 15 years, AWARD developed a reputation as a multi-disciplinary NGO that was driven by the concept of ‘giving a voice to the voiceless’ – both to historically disadvantaged communities and to the environment. The organisation worked across a number of sustainable development domains, including water resource management and rural water supply, restoration and conservation, and small-scale farmer support. Most of this work was carried out in collaboration with a range of stakeholders (including local government and other government actors) and within the context of the Sand River Catchment, where AWARD was itself based. An increasingly important connecting theme was the management of catchments as complex systems that require integrated approaches to planning and management (as shown in projects like the Save the Sands Programme (SSP), the Shared Rivers Initiative (SRI), and PRIMA (the ‘Progressive Realisation of the IncoMaputo Agreement’ programme between South Africa, Mozambique, and Eswatini)).
In late 2012, the organisation was awarded its largest grant, in the form of the $9.8 million USAID Resilience in the Limpopo-Olifants basin (RESILIM-O) programme, which ran from 2014-2020. This climate change adaptation-focused programme saw the further development of integrated tools and approaches, with innovations in collaborating with local government, developing decision support systems and apps, facilitating integrated planning at a catchment scale, and a new framework for monitoring and evaluation, in the form of MERL (Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting and Learning). Subsequent projects to RESILIM-O are featured below.