Opinion/Voices

The first thing I noticed was not the thirst. It was the silence. In rural Ghana's Bono Region, women and children rise before dawn, carrying empty yellow "Kuffuor gallons" toward streams shared with wandering goats — brown after rain, muddy pools in the dry season. Yet this was the water families drank. When clean water finally flowed, one woman put it best: "This water has given us back our time. Now we can think about tomorrow instead of only today." A story of how water r

In 2023, two moments in and around Zinder, Niger, changed how I think about water security, both during the rainy season, when water appears everywhere. Along a highway, families filled containers from reddish-brown pools stained by the soil, water for drinking. Weeks later in the city, a woman offered me a cloudy glass harvested from her rooftop, because safe water was kilometres away. Water was present in both. Security was not. A simple lesson: availability is not the same

My journey in water began with a night I still don't like remembering. In June 2013 I was in Dehradun when the Kedarnath floods hit. More than 5,000 people dead, over 110,000 evacuated. But what I remember isn't the number. It's one woman in the relief area, who came home when her husband and son did not. She is the reason I chose water. Because nobody there experienced "climate change." They experienced a river. This is the story of what the number hides, and why I choose to

"Water no get enemy." When Fela Kuti sang it in 1975, he was repeating an old Yoruba truth: water is life's indispensable gift. No one in their right mind fights it. Yet every day, we do. Dumping refuse in gutters, paving over wetlands, pouring waste into streams, then acting surprised when floods enter our homes. From dying rivers in Ondo to man-made flooding in Lagos, this is the story of how we became water's friendly foes, and how the same hands that pollute can protect.

Our world is getting ever more thirsty for water, but also for uplifting stories. Here's one that puts a smile on people's faces while tackling water scarcity, a warming planet, and plastic waste. In Croatia's Šibenik-Knin County, home to some of the world's largest newborns and tallest teenagers, the tourist board turned its famously clean tap water into a movement called Small Giants Water: 140+ refill stations, 13 schools, and a community falling back in love with its home

As a child in Kurdistan, I rationed every drop and imagined the rest of the world was blue. The place I envied most was Salt Lake City — a city so sure of its water it wrote it into its name. Then I flew there, the first flight of my life, and landed in a desert beside a lake retreating from its own shore. I had crossed the world to reach the wetter place, and the wetter place was drying too. There is no "there." There is one thirst, wearing different faces.

My neighbour Antonio has kept bees for thirty years; he once had a hundred and twenty hives. Today he has four, and so little honey he left it for the bees to eat. In Mendoza, where the province has seeded the clouds since 1959 and rainfall has fallen 25% in a decade, I keep asking the question the valley murmurs but rarely writes down: who does the rain belong to?

Connor Redmile shares how a Māori-led programme trained 27 Māngai Wai Māori across 16 communities to monitor their own supplies — finding and fixing six water-quality concerns that might otherwise have gone unseen. Safe drinking water, he argues, begins long before the tap: with communities trusted to care for the water that sustains them.

Every morning across Zambia, thousands of young people begin their day with water — walking miles before school, queuing at taps, arriving late because the household comes first. For years these stories were treated as ordinary. But ordinary does not mean acceptable. Kachusha Nkosha on how Zambian youth are moving from beneficiaries to designers of their own water future.

This story follows how local communities and grassroots water committees are learning to communicate and prepare for both crises at once, using early warning networks, community radio, and traditional knowledge passed down through generations.

I grew up believing any water we could find was safe to drink. We fetched it from rivers and streams, grateful to have it, never thinking about the invisible dangers it could carry. For millions in rural communities, that risk is still real today. Clean water is not a privilege, it is life and every life is worth protecting.

The headlines call this a heatwave. But from rivers you can walk across to floods mid-drought, climate change is felt through water and this summer, the water is telling us to act now.

Six sessions. Hundreds of water communicators from many countries. Here's what the SIWI Water in Communications 2026 training taught me about telling water stories that actually land.