Awareness and Communication Strategy 9.6 Schools and Training Institutions School-going youth, School clubs, academics, curriculum developers. etc The school is the best avenue for reaching the youth and influencing future leaders. This method employs both formal and non-formal types of education. The formal type targets the curriculum while the other targets extra-mural or extra-curricula activities. Entertainment (especially edutainment), publications and education should be deployed adequately for this target group. 9.7 Water Users Recipient communities or beneficiaries and user communities such as farmers, irrigators, community water committees and other sectoral water users such industries, commercial undertakings and mines. Communities may be groups or individuals in a basin who have related interest in water issues. In most cases, communities have interest beyond domestic water use where water is available for productive use. This target audience should be reached and empowered to ensure ownership. These are the central role-players on issues of sustainability as they remain with the water supply on a dayto-day basis and are the ones who immediately pick the impact of a collapsing water supply scheme. They need to know how services are being offered to them so that they are better prepared to sustain them. As end users, they have the ultimate responsibility to control their use of water. They can individually employ WDM and the cumulative savings can make a huge difference in ensuring equitable access between water user groups. In addition, they have to be encouraged to protect the environment by ensuring clean production technologies and treatment of their wastewater before disposal. 9.8 Funding agencies Cooperating partners or donors, Ministries of Finance and other partners that provide technical assistance. These should be reached in order to increase their understanding of priority capacity gaps within the Water Sector. As the region is still facing serious financial constraints to address the impact of climate change with available resources, there is a need to get external funding from cooperating partners. Therefore, the cooperating partners need to be reached so as to inform their investment choices. They also should be familiarised with the importance of the sustainability of water supply schemes so that a small maintenance budget could be built into the capital budget. This is important since, in most cases, communities are only able to repair small faults within their small budgets but are unable to fix major defects like replacing old pipelines or big water pumps which may require more money. Page 41