The Dominica Water and Sewerage Company (DOWASCO) has awarded the winners of its World Water Day competition.
A number of schools participated in the activities, namely poster and essay competitions, and were awarded prizes at a special ceremony held at DOWASCO on Friday.
The participating schools included: St Mary’s Academy (SMA), Convent High School (CHS) and Orion Academy, Goodwill Secondary School (GSS) and St Martin Secondary School (SMSS).
Hilary Elijah Lawrence of SMA won the prize for the winning poster, while Trisha Cuffy of the GSS won the Essay competition.
World Water Day is celebrated on the 22nd of March yearly and is geared towards bringing attention to the importance of water.
This year’s theme for World Water Day is, “Nature for Water” and highlighted three (3) major challenges faced by the water sector in the 21st-century floods, drought and water pollution. Activities were organized from March 19- 22.
Each student was gifted with a cell phone compliments Digicel/FLOW and their school was awarded a laptop.
“Every year DOWASCO leads the effort here in Dominica for the observance of World Water Day by organizing different activities to create awareness among the general public,” Public Relations Officer (PRO) of DOWASCO, Edward Registe said while speaking at the ceremony. “Some of our activities in the past included exhibitions, school visits, radio programmes and customer appreciation activities.”
According to him this year the company decided to do something slightly different where students were given the opportunity to visit Antrim.
Registe revealed that a global campaign was launched for World Water Day this year dubbed, “The Answer is in Nature” which raises awareness of nature-based solutions and is certain that the campaign will continue beyond World Water Day.
“The central message is that nature-based solutions, such as planting trees to replenish our forest and we can relate to that in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, better management of our rivers and the restoring of wetland are all sustainable and cost-effective ways to help rebalance our water cycle,” he said. “We all have a responsibility to ensure that we manage our water resources very well.”
Meantime, General Manager of DOWASCO Bernard Ettinoffe described the week of activity as, “very fruitful and successful.”
He said Water Resource Management has to be an integrated approach.
“It means involving our communities, schools, our government, our various agencies in terms of how we proceed in managing a resource which we are in abundance of course, but which we can lose if we are not careful as to how we manage it,” he stated.
Ettinoffe went on to say the extent to which the country is vulnerable to climate change and the extent to which Hurricane Maria has impacted the company’s water system and Dominica on a whole, “has led us to believe that we have to do things urgently, but do things much better than we have done in the past.”
congrats trish knew u could do it
Congratulations kids..
Congratulations to all the Winners and participants in the activities for World Water Day. We are in a Decade for Action for Water for Sustainable Development (2018 to 2028) as declared by the United Nations.
World Rivers day is carded for the last Sunday in September (30) and globally the celebration will be observed in many forms as the 13th. Anniversary is observed. Here in Dominica the main event will be held in Roseau dubbed: “DONMNITJEN FO ROSEAU RIVER ENDURANCE COMPETITION” All concerned with the state of the management of our Rivers, especial in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria are invited to participate…
intelligent children. Keep it up!!!