Project Experience of our Experts

Water Management for Enhanced Productivity (WMfEP), 2018 to 2025. Funded by the United States Agency for International Development with a budget of USD 7.5 million, this seven year activity was implemented across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former FATA regions of Pakistan, along with Afghanistan, to support USAID’s objective of accelerating socioeconomic development through improved irrigation and agricultural services for farmers. Delivered through four components and more than sixty completed work packages, the activity produced an IoT based water accounting system known as Indus Telemetry, digital tools for water rotation and indenting, satellite based crop monitoring, and weather driven farmer advisory services.

Our experts held senior leadership roles on this activity, including Chief of Party, Deputy Chief of Party and Component Leads and contributing from proposal development through closeout. Technical output under WMfEP included seven journal papers and a book chapter covering telemetry, sediment management, climate extremes, and satellite based crop monitoring, giving Blue Green Nexus direct, senior level experience in managing a large, multi year USAID activity end to end, from design and stakeholder consultation through field deployment and donor reporting.

PEER2PEER International Convergence Research Networks in Transboundary Water Security 2022 – 2026 (Location – USA, Central & South Asia and MENA regions). PEER2PEER, an implementation-track project funded by NSF (2 Million USD), advances transboundary water & food security research, education, and outreach by catalyzing novel international and interdisciplinary cooperation. This network of networks brings together networks managed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and partner organizations in the United States, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Our expert has been the Steering Committee Member as well as the Team Lead for Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Solar Irrigation for Agricultural Resilience in South Asia (SoLAR) 2019 – 2024 (Location – Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh). This has been a 6-year, 5.5 million USD project funded by SDC, which has supported climate-compatible development of energy and food systems to ensure food security in rural South Asia for resilient livelihoods. Our expert took leadership role of Country Lead for Pakistan in this regional project.

(Location – Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh). This has been a 6-year, 5.5 million USD project funded by SDC, which has supported climate-compatible development of energy and food systems to ensure food security in rural South Asia for resilient livelihoods. Our expert took leadership role of Country Lead for Pakistan in this regional project.

Fostering Trust among Pakistan’s Water Institutions, 2020 to 2021. Funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office this project worked with Pakistan’s Federal Ministry of Science and Technology to rebuild relationships among the country’s provincial water institutions through a series of inter provincial water dialogues, supported by state of the art flow measurement technology intended to remove technical disagreement as a source of mistrust. The project was delivered through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring the redesign of dialogue formats to keep stakeholders engaged remotely.

Our team led the project as Principal Investigator, managing both the hydrometeorological instrumentation work and the stakeholder negotiations directly. The sensor based flow validation methodology developed under this engagement was adopted as a standard method by Pakistan’s water governing institutions and was subsequently scaled into other national projects, illustrating the kind of institutional, trust building outcome that purely technical interventions rarely achieve on their own, and the value our experts place on pairing hardware with dialogue.

Informing Change in the Indus Basin, 2015 to 2018. This component of the DFID funded South Asia Water Governance Program, delivered through IWMI with an initial grant of GBP 1.8 million, worked to inform decision making on the Indus Basin’s water resources across Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, China, and Sri Lanka, at a time when climate change and rising demand were intensifying competition over shared water. The project built the Indus Knowledge Platform and convened dialogues both within Pakistan and across the wider basin.

Our experts convened and facilitated Pakistan’s inter provincial dialogues and conducted an in depth analysis of the 1991 Water Apportionment Accord, surveying the perceptions of water professionals during the dialogue process. The resulting 2017 publication informed Pakistan’s National Water Policy of 2018, and the governance model developed to manage stakeholder engagement during this project became the institutional foundation on which Indus Telemetry was later built, a direct link between this earlier engagement and the flagship monitoring system delivered under WMfEP.

Pakistan Water Security Diagnostic, 2017 to 2018. Commissioned by the World Bank and delivered through IWMI, this study applied the World Bank’s water security diagnostic framework to Pakistan, assessing the balance of economic, social, and environmental outcomes from the country’s water management and setting out reform priorities across governance, infrastructure, and financing. Our experts performed sector analysis and authored chapters of the final report, including a database tracking how development funds allocated to the water sector had actually been disbursed.

The output, published as the World Bank working paper Pakistan: Getting More from Water, has been downloaded more than 30,000 times from the World Bank’s own platform and cited over 150 times in the scientific literature, making it one of the most widely referenced diagnostic assessments of Pakistan’s water sector. Our team’s standing among the lead authors of this report reflects the policy level credibility that Blue Green Nexus can draw on when a client engagement requires more than technical modeling, and instead requires a defensible sector wide diagnosis intended for government and donor audiences.

Enhanced Engagement in Research on Kabul River Basin, 2016 to 2018. Funded by the United States Geological Survey through its Partnership for Enhanced Engagement in Research program at a project value of USD 300,000, this assignment paired historical climate and flow records to build a rainfall runoff model for the transboundary Kabul River, shared between Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the explicit aim of establishing a model for cooperation rather than conflict over a contested basin.

Our experts led the projects and undertook climate change projection modeling and hydrological modeling components of the study. Although data limitations on both sides of the border prevented full model calibration within the project period, the exercise identified the specific data gaps constraining transboundary modeling in the basin and directly informed a subsequent WEAP model for the Kabul River built on satellite data, demonstrating the kind of incremental, honestly reported progress that characterizes credible transboundary hydrological work.