Ayenew Tessera Fenta is Acting Regional Manager of the Nile Basin Discourse (NBD), which is a regional Network of over 600 civil society organizations operating in the 11 Northeastern Africa Countries.

Ayenew is a specialized professional in natural resources management in Africa with over 20 years of experience in the capacities of country programme officer and country programme coordinator with different civil society organizations.

Ayenew has earned Bachelor of Ars Degree in Political Sciences and International Relations, and Master of Arts Degree in International Relations from Addis Ababa University – Ethiopia. He also earned Post Graduate Diploma in Environmental Studies from Nkumba University-Republic of Uganda.

Dominique Berod is the Head of the Earth System monitoring Division at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). He is responsible for WMO activities on water, cryosphere and ocean monitoring and information systems. Before joining WMO in June 2016, Dominique Berod was in 2015 the senior expert for the Water, Cold Regions and Disasters activities at the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Secretariat. From 2008 to 2014, he served as the Head of the Swiss National Hydrological Service, in charge of water monitoring, flow forecast, water information systems and applied research. He was also the President of the Swiss commission of Hydrology and was the Regional Hydrological Advisor of the World Meteorological Organization for Europe, Middle East and the Caucasus. Until 2008, he was the Head of the flood protection unit in the canton of Wallis, Switzerland, responsible for flood mitigation and river restoration projects, including flood forecast and warning as well as hazard mapping. Dominique Berod holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the Swiss Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL, 1989) and a PhD in Hydrology from the same university, in collaboration with the Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, USA (1994).