Waterless

Jenipher (Jane) Changwanda is a Malawian journalist with seven years of experience in the field. She discusses her new story, co-published with CCIJ, called “Collecting water dangerous for women and girls,” which tells the story of villages in Malawi that have been subjected to intermittent and unreliable water supply for the past 22 years. She talks about how that story came to be and how water scarcity poses a danger to women and girls globally.

Akwaowo “Mayor” Otu  is a documentary photographer from Nigeria, who holds a degree in Biochemistry, but has pursued photography to great heights, even publishing a book on street photography. His intimate documentation of the lives of waterless people living in Ruga Katampe, a community mostly made of nomads in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, went viral after he posted the pictures on his Instagram account. The community needed N500,000 (about $1300) to get a borehole for clean drinking water.  

Mayor’s series, which he called “Water of Katampe” was acknowledged by Water Aid; he tells Ruona Meyer that the renowned international agency said it was unable to help the people of Katampe because they had exhausted their funding.   Undeterred, Mayor tweeted at a Nigerian bank. 

The results were swift, and unexpected.

Today's guest is Winston Mwale. Mwale is a CCIJ member and the founder and editor of Africa Brief, a news aggregator for stories about Africa.  A veteran journalist, Mwale has years of experience across east and southern Africa-- and beyond. He has racked up cross-continental bylines and regional awards on this journey. He specializes in investigative and solutions journalism. In this episode, Mwale discusses his work as a journalist and his new story-- published with CCIJ--that explores the women fighting for water from unprotected wells in Malawi. 

Read Winston's work with CCIJ: 

Daily scramble for water part of life for millions in Malawi

Malawi 2020 Presidential Election: Will the country crawl back to normalcy?

Follow Winston on Twitter: https://twitter.com/WinstonMwale

Today, Ruona speaks with CCIJ member Fredrick "Freddie" Clayton, a former civil servant turned journalist. Freddie recently flew from London to the U.S. to meet who he called the "water cops" in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Our guest today is Sonja Smith, a freelance investigative journalist at Namibia's biggest newspaper, called the Namibian. Smith is also a correspondent for the Associated Press and since 2013 she has broken high profile political stories, racking up front page leads consistently. With host Ruona Meyer, Smith discusses her experience as a freelance journalist and her most recent story-- published in collaboration with CCIJ-- about Waterless people in Namibia who are dying trying to collect water for themselves and their families. 

Read Smith's story, Dying for a Drop, here: https://ccij.io/article/dying-for-a-drop/

Khaled Sulaiman has a special relationship with water. In the first episode of Waterless, he speaks with host and CCIJ Social Media Director Ruona Meyer about that relationship that stretches back to his early childhood and his new book, "Guardians of the Water: Drought and Climate Change in Iraq."