there is still a strong colonial legacy of institutional and legal dualism from local to transboundary levels in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is largely ignored in the design of water management institutions.

Indigenous (or customary or informal) water arrangements tend to foster community-based collective action for efficient, sustainable, and equitable water management. The opportunities for support agencies to build upon this strong social capital are still largely untapped.

The formal and administrative nature of institutional innovations enshrined in integrated water resources management reforms is unfit for water development and management of the majority of water users, including the poor and poorest: the informal agrarian sector governed by indigenous water arrangements.

When indigenous rights regimes are replaced by formal water titling, the tendency is to dispossess the majority of rural water users by design. Important lessons can be learnt from policy and implementation of formal and indigenous land tenure, where centralized titling has largely been abandoned after five decades of major failure.

In Southern Africa, the implementation of the policy to redress inequities in water distribution from the past depends upon a combination of factors, including political will, the design and implementation of appropriate legal tools, government's knowledge of water source availability, the bargaining position of the vested water users in particular with regard to compensation issues, and the implementation of distributive land reform.

The project produced recommendations for legal tools to be integrated in national water legislation in Sub-Saharan Africa to prevent discrimination and dispossession of the indigenous water rights of the poor, and prioritize water allocation to the poor (See also Plenary Statement of African Water Laws workshop January 2005 at website www.nri.org/waterlaw/workshop).