Lake Tana is the largest lake in Ethiopia and the third-largest in the Nile Basin. It is a growth corridor for enhanced economic development. As part of this, there are existing and future developments in irrigation, multiple dams, hydropower generations, and landscape changes that need proper water resources and land management. At the scale of the Lake Tana basin, proper management and allocation of water can only be done with the assistance of modeling. Therefore, this training workshop aims to increase knowledge about geohydrological modeling and water accounting that can improve decision-making around Lake Tana water management and governance.

The geo-hydrological modeling is targeted because groundwater for multiple uses is growing in the basin. Among several hydrological models, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) has been widely used for over two decades. The most recent restructured version of the model is called SWAT+, which has advanced modeling schemes such as floodplains . The model has even been advanced by including a fully distributed and physically based groundwater module, gwflow. The standalone model without gwflow has a conceptual representation of the groundwater system; hence, it lacks an accurate representation of the groundwater hydrology. This advanced model has been applied in watersheds in the USA, Belgium, Italy, Morocco, etc., and was found to be a better representative of geohydrological processes than the standalone SWAT+ model. This is very important for professionals in the Lake Tana basin to be introduced to, as the model also uses open­ source geospatial information and is applicable to any model application.

The workshop aimed to train professionals within public institutions in Amhara regions on modeling for better land and water resource sustainability. It was conducted within the premises of BDU with the support of VUB/UGhent by inviting professionals from public institutions engaged in water resource management.