Global Water Operators' Partnerships Alliance

Faraj El-Awar, Programme Manager

Faraj El-Awar is a water expert with over 20 years of experience. He In 1993, Dr. El-Awar joined the Department of Soil and Water Resources at the American University of Beirut where he taught, conducted research, and managed numerous projects in dryland hydrology, integrated water resources management, watershed management, water harvesting, water demand management, natural resources conservation, and sustainable development in remote and marginal areas of Lebanon.

In April 2001, Faraj joined the UN system and worked for the United Nations Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq (UNOHCI) and the UNDP Drylands Development Centre (DDC) Regional Office for Arab States. In March 2006, Dr. El-Awar started coordinating the establishment process of the Arab Countries Water Utilities Association (ACWUA), where he has been appointed as the first ACWUA Secretary General. Since May 2008, Dr. El-Awar joined UN-HABITAT in Nairobi, Kenya, as the Programme Manager of the Global Water Operators Partnerships Alliance.

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Anne Bousquet, Training and Capcity Development Officer

Anne Bousquet holds a master degree in Town Planning and a PhD on 'water sector reforms and the urban poor' in East Africa. She specialized in corporatization of water services and community-based water projects. During her field research, she led enquiries in informal urban settlements in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, exploring the issues of urban inequities with a focus on access to basic need services. Meanwhile she was a junior lecturer in La Sorbonne and University Denis Diderot, Paris, from 2000 to 2007.

After her PhD she worked as a consultant for the French Cooperation Agency in Kenya on urban issues (informal settlements, land reforms, transportation and housing policy) and joined the UN as Capacity and Training Officer for the Global WOPs Alliance in March 2009.

Julie Perkins, Programme Officer

Julie Perkins is an environmental geographer with a Masters in Urban Planning. For over 10 years now her work has been water-related. With UN-HABITAT since 2004, she has contributed to the design and management of various programs focused on increasing the urban poor's access to basic services, addressing issues of governance, capacity, environmental management and monitoring.

Prior to joining UN-HABITAT in 2004, she was founding director of the North Saskatchewan Watershed Alliance based in Edmonton, Alberta, and previously, GIS technician and aquatic field researcher in the North-western Canada bush.

Taeko Yokota joined the world of water through her work with the Secretariat of the 3rd World Water Forum, where she organized the 3rd World Water Forum in Kyoto, Shiga and Osaka in March 2003.

In April 2004, Taeko joined the Japan Water Forum, created to succeed the Secretariat of the 3rd World Water Forum, where she has been working as Chief Programme Officer. There she planned the activities and coordinated with the Japanese and global water stakeholders using the broad network she gained through the experience of forum organisation. As member of the Japan Water Forum, she was involved with the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Water Forum (APWF), a network of water stakeholders in the Asia-Pacific region. As the APWF Secretariat, she led the process of organizing the 1st Asia-Pacific Water Summit, the first ever heads-of-state water meeting to be held in the world.

Taeko holds a Masters degree in Cultural Anthropology from Waseda University in Japan. She also completed one year of study at McGill University in Canada as an exchange student.

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Hanna has a strong educational background in the field of aquatic and environmental sciences. She holds a Masters degree in Limnology from University of Helsinki, Finland. Hanna has also studied Water Management, Hydrobiology and Wetland Management as an exchange student at Universität für Bodenkultur (BOKU) in Vienna, Austria, and Environmental Management in a Bachelor of Engineering Programme at Mikkeli Polytechnics, Finland.

Since the graduation in 2006, Hanna has worked with her PhD thesis titled "Biological and Photochemical Decomposition of Dissolved Organic Matter in Surface Waters" at University of Helsinki. During this work, she has been responsible for organizing and carrying out research experiments both in field and in laboratory, analysing and publishing the collected data, and supervising undergraduate students. Her study areas have varied from a boreal Finnish lake to Baltic Sea and to big rivers in the world such as Congo and Amazon.