The Mékrou River basin, one of the six tributaries of the middle Niger basin, is shared between three countries (Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger) and is characterised by the underdevelopment of its water infrastructure. This presents significant social, economic, environmental and political risks. Furthermore the region's weak capacity to buffer the effects of hydrological variability generates uncertainty and risks for economic activities. As water becomes scarcer compared to its rising demand, there are emerging fears of potential transboundary water conflicts, which will likely constrain the region’s growth. In this sense, there is a need in the region for increasing the long-term sustainability of agriculture and to foster integrated growth in all fields by developing resources, especially in the areas of energy, water resources, forestry exploitation, transport, communication and industry.
One of the fundamental aspects to start tackling all those issues is the need to understand the current status and provide an overview on different topics that affect the basin and define a baseline situation. To do so, an inventory of available datasets covering each of the sectors that have a relevant role in the region is needed, and so identify, gather and organize data available, both publicly and within the responsible national, regional and local organizations is crucial to fulfil future model requirements. This first attempt will serve to provide a frame under which the future water management system will be developed. This will be aimed at providing seamless integration of existing datasets and models, turning to be a common open platform for spatial decision making. In this sense the concept of system openness refers to the flexibility leading to the capability of integrating new knowledge in the analysis process at any later stage.
This document covers topics related to, among others, data related to the general status of the environment including climate, geology and soils, hydrology, hydrogeology, soils, land cover, etc. as well as additional added value maps that will serve as a discussion basis and will facilitate the identification of drawbacks and advantages related to future developments. Most of the collected data is presented as a compendium of maps that have been added in the document but are also available at the ‘Mékrou Water4Growth Group´ within the Aquaknow platform managed by the JRC. Along with the maps, a brief description of data sources and their characteristics, as well as a description and general statistics of the study area are presented. In order to have a harmonized set of information sources, there is an ongoing activity related to the development and setup of a geodatabase for the storage of all current and future data. Together with the geodatabase setup, the development of a Geographical Information System is also being carried out. Such a system will be accessible by users using dedicated GIS services (i.e. WMS, WFS) according to Open Geospatial Consortium standards that allows data visualization, querying and optionally, editing.
Finally, it should be taken into account the coarse resolution of some datasets, thus caution must be paid when interpreting some outcomes at local scale. However, this document should be considered as a “live” document, meaning that new maps will be generated as new data is identified and processed.