 Our objective at IHE is to contribute to making water systems sustainable. What we see is that a lot of water systems, and these can be a water supply system, it can be an irrigation system, it can be a system of large dams, are often times not managed in a sustainable manner. So that's the first thing. Now if they are not functioning properly, this may be a technical problem, but often times it is not only technical, the problems that make systems unsustainable. Oftentimes there is also management weakness in the system, or even there are political issues at stake. So therefore in this research line on water management and governance, we try to understand water systems in a holistic manner. We adopt two approaches. The first approach is to adopt a more analytical approach to understand how these systems work. De andere approach is more of an instrumental nature where we try to develop tools and test instruments to make them work better. There is a new project starting in the Mara, which is a river that flows from Kenya into Tanzania and then in Lake Victoria, and it becomes part of the Nile basin. In the upstream part we see very beautiful forests. Slightly lower down the hills we see very fertile lands where lots of farmers have been farming for a long time, very fertile. When you go further down, the air becomes drier and hotter, and there we see the pastoralists, the Masai, who are grazing their herds. But then with the herds comes also the wildlife and there is severe competition over natural resources, grasslands with also water. And then further downstream you have a nature reserve, the famous Masai Mara, which is a very hotspot attraction for tourists. You can imagine that in 100 years ago all these different uses of the basin could live next side by side. With the increasing pressure on the land we see for instance that the mouth forest is being deforested because new farming households are looking for fertile lands and create their fields on very steep lands which create erosion. Of course this erosion creates problems of nutrient loss in the fields but also of sediments in the river. And then you see that there is lots of overgrazing which creates also problems of erosion which again hampers and competes with the natural resources in the Masai Mara Park. In this project we would like to develop a system of co-governance of this beautiful river basin whereby those who benefit from the resources also take responsibility for the upkeep of the natural resource base. My major fascination of water is that because we know that we all need water that water becomes a medium of collaboration and that's what we see in many places as much as people sometimes say that water is a cause for war we have more evidence also on the ground that water brings people together. We see this in the Netherlands, my own country with the old water boards but we see it also in countries like Tanzania or Nepal. And that is I think a fascinating given which we want to document and we want to teach a new generation of water leaders that water indeed is a catalyst for collaboration and peace.