1. IW-Learn Communication Workshop
Vienna, January 2006
I would just want to welcome you all to our Iw-learn communication workshop here in Vienna,
We are very very pleased to see so many of you here despite all problems with Visa!
I will just give you a short background info on what we are here to achieve how this IW-learn project came about and why and what the Danube and the South Pacific have in common, I am sure many of you are particularly interested in this connection!
The whole idea came from Steve Menzies to IW-learn requesting some simple communication planning tools that could help his 14 national project coordinators to support their communication programmes. Parallell to this request most of the projects here today met in Geneva in October last year for a UNOPS workshop and there we also met Janot from Iw-learn,( she is actually coming later today) and it was Janot who put us in contact with Steve with the idea that THIS tool we could develop together!

2. Objective of Workshop
Get feed-back/lessons learned from GEF projects on implementation of communication activities;
Develop communication Manual for GEF International Water projects;
But it is of course no coincident, that exactly you as a project manager or communication practionaire have been selected to attend this workshop, you are all GEF projects, with excellent experience in communication, and we want to use this experience for the benefit of also other GEF projects,
In addition there is clearly a need for this type of tool, not just by seeing the interest of participating in this Workshop and the input we received already on the ideas of a Manual and correspondence with other projects.
Based on your lessons learned and input we get from you during these two days, we will develop a draft manual that we hope will be useful for other GEF International Water projects to come.
We thought it would be a good idea to have this meeting in order to be able to discuss face to face with you and to get your direct feed-back, and this is also why we are asking all of you to have a small presentation on your experiences and give some examples of best practices and lessons learned from your project implementation.
Steve has already been developing a excellent manual or communication planning guide for the Pacific, we have added on some on the frame work of this and we would like to use this as a starting point of our discussion during these days.
I will now ask Tony to guide us through this framework later, but first we will do a introduction of participants.
Dann-IW-learn?