A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed on Tuesday between French company Simpliciti and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to launch a pilot project in the field of smart water management, marking a new step in cooperation on sustainable resource management. 

The signing ceremony took place at Saad Abdullah Hall in the presence of KRG Minister of Agriculture and Water Resources Begard Talabani, Governor of Erbil Omed Khoshnaw, and France’s Consul General in Erbil Yann Braem.

The KRG Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources in a statement on Facebook said that the signing of the MoU was conducted within the framework of the cooperation and support of the Kiwano (Green Citizen) project.

“This project is an important first step toward advancing strategy, guiding management, and implementing sustainable solutions for monitoring surface and groundwater resources, as well as establishing an advanced system for accessing accurate data and information,” the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources said.

“It concerns the collection and storage of water, its usage, and how to raise awareness of any potential risks, while creating effective measures tailored to the water situation, climate changes, and precipitation at the level of water resources in the Kurdistan Region.”

Consul General Braem told Kurdistan Chronicle that “the French Treasury has allocated €377,000 (out of a total budget of €564,000) for a pilot project with a French company called Green Citizen, a prominent firm specializing in smart management of water resources. The company provides both software and hardware to monitor water quality and quantity.

“This is the foundation of water management, especially smart water management, enabling the ministry and all agencies responsible for water resources to track, hour by hour, water levels and usage, and to plan for future events, such as water scarcity or floods.

“It is very important from a public policy perspective. The company is already working, and will continue to work, with teams from the Ministry of Municipality and the Ministry of Agriculture to strengthen their capacity in water management.

“This pilot project will initially have just under 20 monitoring stations. Our goal is to expand the program so that, within a year or two, it covers the entire region.”

“The goal of the project is to use technology to optimize the water resources and to make sure that we can use data to have a better use of the resources,” added Maxime Berard, Simpiciti’s Director General. 

“So today, it's a grant from the French government that is subsidizing the project for the Kurdistan Region, so that's what we signed today.

“Along the value chain, and the water cycle, the idea is to have different points of data collection, and based on what we get as data, we make the right decisions to optimize the operations. So it goes from the starting point with the boreholes, for example, the distribution.”

The first steps of this project were taken through an initiative with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and that the project will last for the next two years. “Then we have the ambition to expand it to the rest of Iraq,” Berard added.