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

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.