WDI has signed a three-year agreement with Higher Education for Development in Washington to implement the Jordanian Education for Water and Environmental Leadership (JEWEL) project. The project is funded by USAID.
Partnering with WDI will be: the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan; UM School of Natural Resources and Environment; the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell University’s S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management; the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST); the University of Jordan; and the Jordan River Foundation.
The JEWEL partnership focuses on developing leaders at all levels in the public, private and community sectors who understand how to use and how to develop new decision-support tools for natural resources management.  The project will develop a masters of science degree in Integrated Natural Resource Management to train future leaders in applied Natural Resource Management. The focus of the project will principally be on water since Jordan is among the countries with the greatest water shortage.
It also will develop modules to train mid-level private and public sector leaders on the development of optimization models and other tools, as well as develop an interdisciplinary course on salient natural resource management issues that will be required for undergraduate students at JUST and the University of Jordan.
Wajih Owais, president of JUST said, JEWEL “is designed to empower leadership and decision making, and to create resources and knowledge networks to improve decision-making in integrated natural resources management in Jordan.”
Khalid Al-Naif, director of Development Consulting Services at WDI, said that the JEWEL project goes beyond training and incorporates the principles of integrated natural resource management.
He said the program balances hard and soft sciences, merges research and development, sets up a system for adapting and learning; focuses the right type of science at the right level, and changes scientific culture and organization. For example, JEWEL will develop a research center and lab where academics, practitioners, policy-makers, entrepreneurs and community leaders can work collaboratively to develop sustainable business models, optimization tools, research and data.
“It will also create suitable spaces, physically and virtually, for sustaining the collaboration,” Al-Naif said. “It will bring in U.S. and other international models and state-of-the-art applications for use in the classroom and by practitioners. The JEWEL partners will translate academic research into formats appropriate for all users of natural resources.”

© 2007 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)