Jan Dirk Smidt

YEP period 2020 - 2021, batch 20

YEP Role

My formal employer is ‘Witteveen+Bos Consulting Engineers’, who formed a partnership with VEi Dutch Water Operators in Uganda. From Kampala VEi is implementing a Water Operating Partnership with the National Water and Sewerage Cooperation in Uganda. In this project VEi supports NWSC with the sustainable expansion of groundwater abstraction systems to meet the growing demand for safe potable water in the growing number of supply areas across Uganda. I will work on long term water resource planning, project management to showcase best practice, stakeholder management and skills transfer to develop a dedicated professional ground water abstraction team in NWSC. In addition, I assist the Regional Team leader in effectively coordinating and supervising the Central African accounts in Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Ghana.

Skills

• Enthusiastic and proactive
• Solution driven
• Creativity
• Communication
• IWRM
• Hydrological and geohydrological modelling
• GIS 
• Programming in Python

Background

Nationality: Dutch
Education: 

• Bsc: Earth Sciences, Utrecht University 
• Msc: Earth, Surface and Water - (geo)hydrology track, Utrecht University

Experience before YEP

• October 2018 - now. Junior (geo)hydrologist at Witteveen+Bos: I work on groundwater-related consulting projects. Several examples are Time Series Analysis to quantify the impact of groundwater-extraction for drinking water and hydrological and geohydrological modelling to increase water security under changing climate conditions (especially droughts);
• Sep 2017 - April 2018. Msc internship at Acacia Water: I worked on the 'Sustain Darfur'- project for which I analyzed the water availability in four catchments in Darfur (Sudan) by setting up hydrogeological maps and hydrological models.