The Cornell and Bahir Dar University Partnership for Integrated Adaptive Water Management.

The Cornell University/Bahir Dar University (CU/BDU) Master's program officially began in early November 2007 when 20 students reported to BDU to begin studies in Integrated Watershed Management. In January 2010, another 14 students began their studies on the Bahir Dar campus. This is the first graduate degree program where a student can earn a Cornell degree without setting foot on a Cornell campus. The cost to the donors of educating 10 students is approximately equal to one student trained in the US.

The program is based at BDU, the primary university in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. BDU's location, adjacent to Lake Tana, makes it ideal for a program in watershed management. Lake Tana contains more than 50% of the stored fresh water in Ethiopia.  Excessive siltation due to inappropriate water resources and land management in the surrounding highlands is damaging the lake. The original goal of the CU/BDU program was to train professionals who can help to institute more effective and sustainable watershed management practices. Our current more ambitious goal is to train a cadre of highly qualified and enthusiastic university professors who are interested in both improving the curriculum, working across disciplines and conducting hydrology related research on both mitigation and adaptation to climate change in the future.

In the Master's program non-engineering students obtained an excellent grasp of hydrological engineering concepts while most engineering students performed social surveys.  All have shown the ability to utilize concepts taught in class in practical applications. This group of Ethiopian students has been amazingly productive scientifically. They have demonstrated, among others, that saturated areas at the end of the rainy season drive many hydrological processes such as runoff and (gully) erosion. These saturated areas are key in predicting the effect of climate change on agriculture and forestry.