Boreholes may sound like a commonsensical solution to water scarcity in the drylands—so why do they not always make people more resilient?

This episode explores where aid projects have unintended results—and why development organisations are so rarely going back to check.

Dorice Agol, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, talks about what she found when she went to check on a water development project in Turkana, northern Kenya, several years after it ended. Nancy Balfour, a founding trustee at the Centre for Humanitarian Change, shares her experiences of a different project in Ethiopia, where politics, preconceptions, and a lack of willingness to learn led to facilities which few people use.

The lesson: building resilience in the drylands isn’t a technical fix, and people need to put down their bag of solutions and start asking the right questions.

Host: Bola Mosuro. Contributors: Dorice Agol and Nancy Balfour.

Dynamic Drylands is produced by the research-to-action programme Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises (SPARC). SPARC is managed by Cowater International in partnership with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Mercy Corps, and ODI Global.  This material has been funded by UK aid from the UK government; however the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies.

For show notes, visit www.sparc-knowledge.org/dynamic-drylands-podcast or find us on X (@SPARC_ideas)

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