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

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.