With the participation of 13 Associations of Communal Aqueducts, the ASADAS Resilientes project of EUROCLIMA's Urban Water sector, provided training in digital communication to strengthen communication capacities between Aqueducts and their communities.

April 18, 2023. San José, Costa Rica. Strengthening digital communication skills, especially in the management of social networks; the creation and graphic design of messages with web tools and the basic use of Meta Business Suite -the Facebook and Instagram platform-, were the key topics of the second training workshop for the Administrative Associations of Communal Aqueduct and Sewerage Systems -ASADAS-, in the framework of the ASADAS Resilient project. This initiative is financed by the EUROCLIMA program and benefits 60 communal aqueducts in Costa Rica.

Representatives of 13 ASADAS met on April 12, 2023 at the Fab Lab of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture - IICA, to share knowledge with the Voyager Communication team, in charge of the communication of the Resilient ASADAS project.

Miguel Rodríguez Solano, administrator of the Asada Santa Rosa Turrialba, commented that "It is excellent the support that the project gives us on various issues related to resilience to climate change and other key aspects, such as the use of information technologies. In most of the ASADAS, the person who manages them is also in charge of communication and social networks, and as they are not specialists in the field, they contribute a lot to us".

The Resilient ASADAS Project has a communication component, which also includes support to the aqueducts involved so that they can communicate effectively with the communities to which they provide drinking water services.

As part of the training strategy, it also seeks to promote the exchange of knowledge among the aqueducts. Luzmilda Quirós Corrales, administrator of ASADA San Juan de Puriscal, explains: "The workshop was very useful and will be of great benefit to the aqueduct. Listening to the communication strategies used by other aqueducts is also important because sometimes it doesn't occur to us that certain things work and this way we learn from each other. We can make the presentations more beautiful, give the aqueduct a personality by having the same graphic line in all the publications. The truth is that it was very useful.

Most of the aqueducts that participated in this workshop are in the process of elaborating plans and tools for the improvement and efficiency of their services, as well as five-year plans for the implementation of the Water Resource Protection Tariff, which will bring great benefits to the ASADAS and their communities.

According to Esteban Monge, from the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center - Cedarena, "Knowledge in communication is extremely useful to

improve processes aimed at facing the consequences of climate change in these aqueducts, because it allows the ASADAS to involve the people of the communities and the institutions they work with in the actions that favour resilience and mitigation, which, in turn, will allow protecting the water resource".

Resilient Asadas has been implemented in Costa Rica since 2021, thanks to the joint work of Cedarena, the Regulatory Authority of Public Services and the Costa Rican Institute of Aqueducts and Sewerage, together with the participating Asadas. This project is part of EUROCLIMA, a European Union program in the Urban Water sector, which is implemented by the French Development Agency - AFD and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation - AECID.

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