Abstract:
A prerequisite for integrated land and water resources management (ILWRM) is a holistic river basin
assessment. The latter requires information and data from different scientific disciplines but also
appropriate data management systems to store and manage historical and real time data, set up protocols
that facilitate data and information access and sharing among different stakeholders, and triggering
further collaboration among different institutions in support of watershed-based assessment, management
and planning. In West Africa in general and especially in the transboundary Volta River basin where
different environmental data are collected and managed by different agencies in different countries and
also where data access and dissemination are very challenging and difficult tasks, comprehensive river
basin information systems are required. This paper presents the Oti River Basin Information System
(OtiRBIS), a web-based data storage, management and analysis platform that addresses these needs and
facilitates ILWRM implementation in the Kara river basin.
