 I would like to welcome you all to this very first symposium of the Water Development Partnership Program. We are very excited to have so many of you here with us. In the coming three days, it is our aim to encourage critical and reflective discussions to shed light on the complex processes involved in addressing water challenges in an inclusive and sustainable way in various parts of the world. We therefore look forward to your inputs during this symposium so that together we can discuss what is needed to make impacts beyond reporting. Over the last weeks, as we prepared for this event, our team has been battling with feelings of hopelessness and heartbreak, which I'm sure many of you share by seeing the extreme violence and injustices being perpetrated against innocent civilians in an increasing number of places in the world, including in several of the focused countries of our program. As team, we extend our solidarity to our partners, colleagues, and students in these places and call upon our political leaders in the global north to take a firm stance against these atrocities and to take their responsibility in stopping these violations of human rights immediately. This sorrow made us realize that in a world of increasingly polarized debates, what is needed more than ever is that we continue to talk with one another, even if and especially when we disagree. We need to reach out and nurture partnerships with those who, like us, aim for justice and peace, even if we follow different paths. And above all, we need to continue to think of others as they are us and we are them. So therefore, I would like to start this symposium with sharing a poem by Mahmoud Darvis, a late poet from Palestine who reminds us to think of others in everything we do. As you prepare your breakfast, think of others. Do not forget the pigeons' food. As you conduct your wars, think of others. Do not forget those who seek peace. As you return home to your home, think of others. Do not forget the people of the camps. As you sleep and count the stars, think of others, those who have nowhere to sleep. As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others, those who have lost the right to speak. As you think of others far away, think of yourself. Say, if only I were a candle in the dark. And with these words echoing in our souls, I would like to hand over the virtual microphone to our master of ceremony and the one who largely organized this symposium, my dear colleague, Ein Kontrakter. Thank you, Jelsje. And I welcome you all to our very first annual symposium from the Water and Development Partnership Program. Over the next three days, we will listen to 15 presentations with varied perspectives, some based here in the Netherlands at IHE DERFT, and some from our partners, our international partners all over the world. Each day of the symposium is divided into two sessions with three presentations each, followed by reflections where we hope to share stories, not only of success, but also of failures, of uncertainties, and of what we don't yet know. We hope that you have all received the symposium program and for those who have missed it, my colleague, Debora, will also share a link in the chat to view the program. Before we begin, just a little bit of housekeeping. We encourage you to use the chat freely and interact with each other throughout the presentations. But if you have a question for the speakers, please put it in the question and answer section, which you will find at the Zoom toolbar at the bottom of your screen. At the end of all three presentations, there will be space for reflections. At this time, you can raise your hand and the host can give you permission to speak. We also encourage you to use your camera while speaking, but please keep in mind that this session is being recorded for online distribution. With these housekeeping rules in mind, I would like to introduce our first session, Advocacy for Impact, and our moderator, I welcome our moderator, Paige Shipman. Paige works as an independent consultant, supporting diverse campaigns and advocacy initiatives on human rights, economic, environmental, and gender justice issues. Prior to becoming a consultant, she worked for Friends of the Earth International, where she played a key role in developing global programs and campaigns, including an international solidarity system to support at-risk environmental defenders and a global campaign to make finance and investment more just and environmentally sustainable. We're really honored to have Paige Shipman join us and moderate this session, which is a very experienced facilitator and we're very happy to have her with us. And along with her, we have Merta Shannon for rapid offer this session. Merta Shannon has a special relationship with our program. He's a senior water governance expert at the Dutch Environmental and Human Rights Organization, both ends. He works with civil society groups around the world on water justice issues, and he has a PhD in international development studies. And I say that he has a special relationship to our program because in the lead up to the UN Water Conference earlier this year, Merta worked with us to organize the collaborative drafting of the transformative water pack with over 40 grassroots environmental justice organizations from the global south. So I'll pass the mic to you Paige. Thank you so much. It's really an honor to be here. I wanna thank you all for having me. I'm really pleased to play the role of kicking off this symposium with all of you. And I'm sure today we'll bring about some really informative and hopefully very inspiring discussions about a variety of topics and first and foremost, advocacy for impact. I wanted to launch the discussion today with just some thoughts from my perspective as an environmental justice advocate. I can see, I think we have, let's see, some 200 people at the symposium today, which is really exciting. I think we all bring to the symposium a very diverse set of knowledge and experiences. You all are working in very different ecosystems with very different contexts, with very different communities. But I believe that we're all here together because we share one thing and that is a commitment to transformation. Yeltsin said it very well, to inclusive, equitable, environmentally sustainable water management practices. It's a lot of words with a lot of syllables. So one of the questions I think we need to ask ourselves is what does that mean in practice and how do we go about it? I think today we have a lot of people participating that come from a very scientific background, maybe academic backgrounds. You all are water experts. One thing, unfortunately, that we know, and we can say this with our experience from climate change, is that scientific knowledge alone is not gonna bring about the change that we know we need. So the point I think of this discussion today is to talk about going a step further than research, a step further than knowledge building or evidence building, even a step further than analysis. Because what we really need to do is actively convince people, particularly decision makers and policy makers, to take that knowledge and do things differently. So to change laws, policies and practices. This is how I see advocacy. And I think it's also really important to talk about how advocacy itself, how the advocacy process itself can and should contribute to the inclusivity and the transformation that we seek. And I think this is very nicely captured in a simple phrase that probably all of you know, I hope you know, nothing about us without us. I just feel that it's important to underscore the need to learn from the very people that we aim to support in our practices, in bringing about a transformation. I think it's important to recognize that their experiences and insights, those particular people who have the least amount of access and control over water, whose power is circumscribed, to make sure that they are playing a key role in our advocacy processes. So that our advocacy can be inclusive by recognizing that it's important to learn from them, to support them and to ensure that we're amplifying their voices, amplifying their demands and ensuring that their access and decision-making power over water is secured. I think that, well, I said the word and I think it's really important, the word power. I see our task, perhaps the most challenging and crucial aspect of our task is addressing the power imbalances that lead to exclusion, that lead to lack of access to water. And I see that as not just power on a global level, although that's very important, but power on the local level as well and everything in between. So this can include addressing power relations in terms of exclusion and oppression based on gender, based on ethnicity, based on caste, religion, and very much so the power imbalances between the global north and the global south, what many would now refer to as part of a very important decolonization process. So my point is, is that not only do we need to think about advocacy, how we do it most effectively, but also about the way we do advocacy as a means of achieving our goals. So it's important to ask yourself questions like who's involved in our advocacy activities and how, whose knowledge and expertise is recognized, what stories are told, who tells them, how are they told, what are our goals and who decides what those goals are. So those are just some questions that I wanna pose to you today. And I encourage you to think about those questions as we move through the symposium and as we move through the session over the next hour and a half. And I'm delighted that in this session, we're gonna hear from about three very different advocacy initiatives. I wanna thank all of our presenters for joining us to share their experiences. And as I think was mentioned just a few minutes ago, we'd like to hear not only about your successes but also about your challenges, your lessons learned. I'd love to hear what didn't work or what you wish you would have done differently or what you're doing differently now based on experiences and the learning process. We have about 10 minutes for each presenter, each guest and we will have time following all the presentations to answer some questions. So please put your questions in the question box at the bottom and we'll see at some point either immediately following the presentations if we have a bit of time or at the end of all the presentations to have the Q&A session. So with that, I would like to turn the virtual microphone over to our first speakers. It's Florence Tanui and Bessie Katambi and excuse me for my horrible accent. Bessie has a background in international conflict management and a PhD in environmental governance and management from Wangari Matai Institute of Peace and Environmental Studies. Florence is a postdoc fellow at the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences at the University of Nairobi. She does research on groundwater in arid and semi arid regions in Kenya. And both Bessie and Florence have indicated that their aim, I love this, this is really beautiful, is to translate research into actionable solutions and thereby improving environmental governance and management, particularly in relation to groundwater. So I would like to welcome them to give their presentation. Thank you very much, Paige. And we're very grateful that we were considered to be here to share our experience on groundwater as my colleague Florence is putting up our slides. We are also working with one of our, with IHE and the GWS sense. All right, so I will speak from where, all right. Thank you Florence. We are looking at the impact of water security and where we had our project was in Trucana. What does water security mean for us? It is having water that is a secure place that has good quality and it is accessible to everybody. And it also means that we look at the future of the next generation, will they have the same resource? And this is what we looked at when we were looking at our project in Trucana. To give you a background of Trucana, Trucana is one of the Northwest counties in Kenya. We have 47 counties in Kenya. And Trucana is also considered an asa, which is a arid and semi-arid county with what is so unique is that it has a huge lake that is still salty, but this is not the lake that provides water for the people of Trucana. The people of Trucana as well have been considered under the marginalized communities within the nation of Kenya. And from this, we looked at how do we improve their water security? How do we work together to advocate that water indeed is life? And how do we get them to have this water? So in this, we had our project, which is called REACH. And with the REACH, our focus was on four things. It was four prone. The first one, we were looking at climate change resilience. Being that it is a county that experiences both drought and floods at the same time, different times of the year, we sought to make them to be climate resilient. We also looked at the issue of water quality. And this issue of water quality looked at how the water they have, is it safe for drinking? Is it safe for them to have? Do they have access to fresh water? And if they do, how do they access and is it affordable for them? The other aspect here now, we looked at the inequalities. There have been a lot of conflict within this region because of that resource called water. So the inequalities, both culturally, at the community level, at the county level, this we addressed by involving them from the onset and getting to hear what the inequalities they have experienced of a long period of time. And they don't work in vacuum. So which brings the fourth aspect, which is the institutions. These institutions are not just the government institutions, are also the community institutions so that we can influence policy and make sure advocacy is well done and within their limits to access this water. And that is what we are calling the impact. And I'll call on Florence to give us the key aspects of what we were able to experience in this place. Florence, be sure to unmute your microphone. Yep. Yes, sorry for that. So I'm just thanking Bessie for the comprehensive introduction that she has given. The rich program began the research in 2015 and I'm going to report on the key advocacy impacts that we achieved since 2015 to date. So the first one is reducing inequalities. Bessie has given a background that Turkana is actually very marginalized in terms of water accessibility and also development perspective. And one of the first messages is that there is need to reduce inequalities and what we did was to ensure that we make impact from the research perspective is that you have to bring everybody on board that is consulting before the research begins to ensure that we capture their perspective and also the knowledge in which they knew about safeguarding their water resources and also where their water resources, especially the fresh water areas were situated. So we had to consult them to understand their needs in terms of policy gaps and also in terms of the water access issues. We involve them throughout their work, during the fieldwork and also going back to them to be able to share the research outputs and be sure that they were involved in all the steps of their work. So the four words that were very important to us was consulting, involving everybody, ranging from the communities, the governments, stakeholders that were involving the NGOs in the regions who are also carrying out different water projects and collaborating with them for eventually making informed decisions from the scientific outputs. And so the second message that we had was that we had to identify where the vulnerable communities were. And the most important thing was that the freshwater resources in this area was quite limited because it occurred along the riparian areas of the major river that is the River Tackwell, which is the only perennial river in the county. And so we found out that most of the poor households or poorer households were actually situated at the far flung areas of this river where groundwater was also very saline. And so what we came to understand was that inequalities with water access also varied with areas where there was freshwater and also areas where we had saline water. And so for this, we had to take these such outputs or such information to the discussions to the county stakeholders to be able to make them understand their water needs and also how the communities are having or experiencing different water related challenges. For this purpose, Turkan County is being able to be informed with where to expand the water supply initiatives that they were undertaking. And that that message was the fact that they are listening to action on already immediate water needs. So the first one was that while we have identified the communities that had high level of vulnerabilities to do with groundwater and also where inequalities were quite significant, we highlighted regions where the groundwater was quite saline and also these communities were isolated and live far away from the freshwater resources. And one of the initiatives or interventions that the county and especially the Lodwa municipality undertook was establishing a water tracking program which involve delivering freshwater to the communities around two to three times a week to be able to question them from continuously drinking the saline water resources. So this is and also being sharing the same information with the county with respect to the fact that drinking saline water of course is harmful to health and also making these communities to be aware and to be able to demand for the same to be done for them even after the project has exited. And the second part of impact is building capacity for climate resilience which focused on institutional strengthening and also of course environmental management. And as we know that arid areas we have lacking data. So what we did was we had multiple methods in which we had to go to the ground and establish where data could be found. I am aware my Chinese have but this diagram shows all the sectors that needed to collaborate to be able to protect the Lodwa alluvial aquifer system which is the only freshwater resource in the area. If we had extra time I could go around to explain what it means but the outer circle indicates what will the institution could play a role in terms of either affecting the water system positively or negatively but collective action needed to be taken along these thematic areas to protect the water resource. These are, I will focus on this middle image. We showed areas of high salinity and areas of freshwater that is the dark blue. So this map is being used at the county level to actually drill wells for freshwater for the communities at the moment. So it is a decision making tool. And also we developed an environmental monitoring plan which we recently launched two weeks ago at the national level for the purpose of having the same being done for other counties specifically that target the aquifers that are vulnerable to human contamination and also issues to do with climate change. We have trained water sector professionals in this area to be able to implement the documents that I've just shown and issued them with certificates for the purpose of showing that they took part in the training and they are able to take the actions that have been proposed in the environmental monitoring and management plan which is I think one of the very key decision making documents that can go long term in terms of protecting the water resources and also informing the county water plans. And finally, this is the approach that we have used that's a gap stakeholder engagement risk-based approaches for scientific outputs and of course capacity building tools for the county that can go a long way into the future. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Florence. I really appreciate it. I'm sorry to have you speak so quickly to make sure we have time for the rest of our discussion but thank you. It sounds like an incredibly comprehensive and very powerful project and I think we will probably have some questions following the other presenters. I would like to introduce Anika McGinnis and Leonard Nakusa. They both come to us from InfoNile in Uganda. They are part of the driving force behind an online platform that focuses on building trust and connection and collaboration between water scientists and journalists in the Nile Basin. And since the platforms launch which is just a little over a year ago, a year and a half ago more than 600 users have already registered for accounts. And the goal of the platform is to increase collaboration between journalists and scientists. And so we will hear more from Anika and Leonard about this exciting initiative. Welcome. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for having us and InfoNile on this call. So I am here to present about our project called NileWell, the Gate for Transboundary Water Research and Communication in the Nile Basin. And I am presenting alongside my colleague Leonard Nakusa who is our Programs and Strategy Manager and the Co-Founder and Managing Director of InfoNile, a project of water journalist Africa. So InfoNile is a cross-border group of more than 780 water and environmental journalists who we call geo-journalists with a mission to uncover critical stories on water issues in the Nile River Basin through data-based multimedia storytelling. And we focus on building the capacity of journalists and connecting them to water and environmental scientists to report original cross-border investigations. The issues that we are addressing as InfoNile and in this particular project are one, the increasing water and environmental crisis in the Nile Basin but at the same time insufficient resources and training for journalists to produce stories which are based on data and science and which can lead to action in the water sector and also a disconnect between journalists and scientists partially due to a trust gap between the two groups which we have found through working with journalists and scientists for many years and also a lack of skills on the part of journalists to report on science and also on scientists to be able to communicate their research. So these are some of the issues that we are attempting to address in our project funded by DOPC-3 with the objective to foster transformations to the sustainable, transboundary sharing of water resources in the Nile Basin through catalyzing science-based information with impact. And essentially in this project we are attempting to bridge the gap between water scientists and journalists to contribute to advocacy on water issues in the Nile Basin through good journalism. And the outcomes of our project include establishing a learning network of scientists and journalists. So here we are building upon our existing networks. You can see the actors in the project. We have the Nile Basin Capacity Building Network Foundation as one of our partners which is a network of scientists and water researchers in the Nile Basin. And we are maintaining a network of journalists. So we are attempting to increase and improve upon this network. We are training journalists in science communication and we're also training scientists in science communication how they can better communicate their research. We are attempting to reach engaged decision makers with information through various kinds of events, programs and stories and also work with young people and communities to increase water sustainability still through storytelling. We are also documenting all of our best practices in science communication through this project with our partner IHE Delft. And our main output that we wanted to showcase on the forum today is our Nile Well platform. This is a platform that we launched in April 2022 which connects water and environmental scientists and journalists. So this is what the platform looks like when you get to the home page you are able to connect to search and connect with either a scientist or a journalist. You're able to join some of our training programs or browse different resources that we have on the platform. Currently since April 2022 we have been able to recruit 183 researchers and 444 journalists all from the region onto this platform and they have established 259 connections we have also posted 91 resources. So this is what the platform looks like on the inside and when you search for a journalist or a scientist you can search by location, by research interest or by their name. When you get to their profile you can connect with the person and you can also send them a message which will go directly to their email when they respond via email you are in direct communication with them. So the platform facilitates that initial communication that initial step maybe for the journalist to reach out to the scientist for an interview and then the communication can happen over email. We have been doing activations since the start of our project to promote this platform through our network of coordinators. We have nine country coordinators and also our team which is based in Uganda. In these activations we have visited different research and scientific institutions as well as different media houses to recruit journalists and scientists to the platform and explain more about it and also organizing science cafe events that bring together the two groups. So I won't go into details but these are some of the institutions that we have visited so far and we're planning to have the next activations in Rwanda, Tanzania and Burundi. Some of the learnings that we had during these activations one there are many concerns among the scientists about the security of the site, the protection of their data and the resolution of conflict. So in response we worked with our scientists and journalists we consulted with them, we consulted best practices for other platforms and we worked on terms and conditions with our lawyer which we uploaded to the site. We have also been addressing various technical issues which we have been trying to improve over time and our focus so far had been mainly on recruiting members so we then embarked on the second stage which was focusing on engagement. Part of this is including a points accrual system where users will be able to gain points for participating in events for connecting with other users and at the end of the quarter or the year they'll be able to receive prizes based on the points that they accrue. The other way we are trying to engage users now on the site is through a program called Science Wednesdays which we launched in March 2023. This is a monthly program where we invite a scientist every month to share his or her research with journalists to inspire reporting and forge connections between the two groups. It is just a one hour cafe including a 20 minute presentation on the research from the scientists, questions from the moderator and from the journalists and then a review quiz where we also award prizes at the end to the participating journalists. These sessions are live streamed on the site and the presentation is uploaded to the resources section and we always share the scientists profile with the journalists that could enable them to connect and to collaborate after the session. We would also like to invite other scientists from IHE Delft who may have conducted relevant research to join us in future events we would love to have you. So these are some of the topics that we've covered so far from many different countries in the Nile Basin and different topics around water and environment and these are some of the impact we have seen. We have seen a couple of stories reported by journalists after the events based on the research that we shared and about 64.5% said the program was meeting their expectations and 22.6% said it was exceeding which was quite positive feedback for us. About 77% said they had made connections so you can see some of the other impacts here, the numbers who said they had been able to connect after the event or send a message to the platform. So now I'll turn it over to my colleague to talk about the other program that we have launched under this platform. Thank you very much, Annika. As a way of inferno to practically do the fellowship between scientists and journalists, this year in July we started a co-production program which brought in journalists and scientists from the Nile Basin. These journalists, we selected eight journalists and eight scientists from countries under the Nile Basin brought together to be trained by the university reporting transponder resources and others. So the program is running, it's up and running and these two are working together in order. This would help to bring down issues of mistrust, issues of miscommunication and maybe to try as much as possible to see how the two can work together and we have a very good communication between the journalists and the scientists. The training was residential, it was held in Ntebe and several sessions were done. And apparently the program is run online. We are supporting the journalists and the scientists in several activities. For example, they have different communication outputs like they're supposed to come up with at the end of the project or print or the end of the program, one podcast, videos, stories and others and all of this will be published by them and the radios or maybe media houses that the journalists are working in. We have encountered challenges while implementing these projects. For example, these challenges, they are not so close-cutting by the range between different countries. For example, Rondi, South Sudan and Sudan, we had good scientists because of course you know what is happening in countries like South Sudan and Sudan. Then the issue of Rondi is something to do with the language which is really quite challenging, the fact that they use more of French than English. However, it is a lesson learned and as info nine we're trying as much as possible to see how to work upon the thing. We're encountering another challenge of commission access from researchers. Some of this research is owned by different institutes. So it takes a while for us to get the authorization to access that research and maybe be used by journalists. Still we still have issues of mistrust and misrepresentation where researchers believe or scientists believe that journalists are really not representing them very, very well. But somehow through the co-production program we are really seeing that work is coming out well and at least there is some big relationship and we are planning to have another co-production program which is going to take place next year and we hope by the end of the two co-production programs surely we shall have the issue of mistrust reduced. Thank you very much for listening to us. Thank you so much. We have a couple questions and we have a little bit of time to ask you some follow-up questions. One came, one you sort of very briefly addressed. The question was are there any political conflicts among these countries and if so does that conflict influence the work of the journalists and scientists in the Nile Basin and you mentioned that but maybe you want to say a few more words on that. We'll also have a Q&A session after the final presentation but we just take a couple minutes to follow up on that question. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that. Yes, we encounter those conflicts. For example, if you look at the conflict that is happening in Sudan it is something that has really disrupted our work. It is making it a little bit complicated and the general majority of the general structure in Sudan have moved maybe to different countries like Ethiopia, UAE and others. This has really impacted most of our projects because to try to get to reach them is quite challenging. However, we try as much as possible to make sure maybe when the peace or when the issue of the conflict reduces somehow we try to reach out to them. However, it is really so much impacting our programs but we're trying to see how we can work with them even when they are far away from their home countries. Just to follow up on that water resources in the Nile Basin can be quite a political issue and has caused various tensions. I don't know if I want to call it conflicts for say but definitely there are tensions over water resources between different countries in the Nile Basin and this does affect the ability and willingness of both the journalists and the scientists to be able to put out the information in a very neutral manner where there are political influences. For example, we have had challenges bringing on board scientists from different countries to talk about the issue of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam even scientists who have done very good research on this topic because of maybe fear and those kinds of political reasons. So it's definitely a challenge that we face but this is why we try to focus on co-production and collaborations among both the journalists from different countries and the journalists with the scientists to be able to bring out more unbiased information which comes from different sources. This improves the safety of the journalists and the scientists and also improves credibility and the depth of the work that they produce together. So yeah, thank you for the question. Great and there's one action that falls up quite a bit on what you just said that was just maybe very briefly touch on how you effectively persuade scientists or journalists to participate in the program. Thank you very much. I don't think we persuade them because the word persuasion would sound like we are trying to but we put up a call for example in this co-production program we put out a call as Info9 invited prospective scientists to come and take part in the program. Of course there is a stipend to that which Info9 gives to each of the scientists and that maybe some of them are also looking for various platforms where they can publish their works, their woodworks but from other than the boardrooms and wherever. So it is also an opportunity for them that they feel they could exhaustively use and secondly they feel most of their woodworks go unreported so they feel working with journalists trying to understand each other would help to bring out maybe some of the information that putting out some of the issues they're trying to put out especially in line with water by diversity and others so and genuinely speaking we have had maybe different applications from several scientists and actually maybe we even don't have a choice we can't even afford to work with all of them but rather select a few of them. That's great that there's so much interest thank you so much for that for your presentation and the interesting information we have some more questions but we'll get to those after we hear from our final speaker and I'm going to invite first introduce Emmanuel Acapabio Emmanuel is the coordinator of the WASH Gender Project Nigeria he is a professor of human geography and the current director of international programs at the University of Uyo in Nigeria he's also an international associate at the UNESCO Policy and Science at the University of Dundee in the UK. Welcome Emmanuel Thank you very much a project chair we're trying to understand for instance in Nigeria because we've been a lot of literature on gender-based discrimination in access to water where we men I'm sorry to interrupt you Emmanuel have you seen the, is it shared please no we're seeing the just the list of files but not the presentation oh my god I've shared it it has come up here I don't know why let me in and reshare has it come up? not yet Emmanuel share his presentation I have a question can we do it would you like us to share your presentation please you can share it Nadine is sharing it so please tell her when you want to change the slide alright thanks yeah a project is on trying to understand how being a man or a woman influence your capacity to access water sanitation and hygiene in part of Nigeria of course you can see the context here about the quality of the type of water people drink on communities for instance in the riverine areas this one there's a kind of water someone community drinks in the upland region these are the sources of water for drinking and other purposes and depending on location the categories of toilet people use also differ depending on context for instance in the areas in one of the communities we visited I hope you are seeing the pointer there this is the kind of toilet but this is segregated for men and women because this kind of toilet if it's once it is flooded you can take and cover some sources of water in fact affect some sources of water including the salts that will be coming from the main sea so this is the main context here but a question is about how being a man or a woman influences access to shape access to these sources of water we all know there are some cultural issues surrounding surrounding some communities in regards to accessing water for different categories of the gender so a study tried to look at this in southern part of Nigeria so this is what can you change this slide please so now what we actually observe here is we see severe discriminations for instance very importantly mothers of twin children lactating mothers menstruating women find it difficult to access some bodies of water depending because of some sociocultural beliefs surrounding those bodies of water for instance in Istinobulu mothers of twin may not have problems but lactating mothers will have problems will not be able to they are not given access to because of some beliefs that once they are spiritually they are unclean and if they have access to that body of water it will start spewing some impurities and can dry off affecting the entire community until some rituals are made so there is some sacrifices so we did these findings and others but interest is on these categories of findings mothers of twin because it went viral when we organized media chat and also in a phoning program in a local radio station Nadine can you please share this screen actually we went about trying to get the media into this perspective because it is written in literature people may be hearing a lot about this but study systematic studies trying to capture the challenge the level of challenge in some local communities very very lacking so we took up the challenge and did this and when we reported this we did a brief the media on this I think it was a big surprise because it went viral and what actually happens is it touched on the government of the day first the insinuated politics that your position is trying to push us into discrediting the government and this kind of thing counter narratives trying to say that we are working for a different sort of body that the story is not quite true and it was followed by pressure on the affected communities to deny report which they resisted and also followed up by independent media investigations which they actually confirmed that what happened here is can you share it please what happened here is what we did was first thing we went on now trying to we went on trying to get the communities in a very large public meetings to have their conversations have conversations on this and related issues initially we were very afraid because these issues are very sensitive but we gather some cooperation in one of the communities especially in the upland region we are very corridor and so in a public meeting women were supervised and they couldn't say much but we broke up the meeting into smaller groups well we could gather some snippet of information but when we got one on one interview we discovered the women were very open in what they said but this was quite different from the other communities for which women were highly supervised in fact 98% of participants were men and we tried our best to get women involved it wasn't possible but at a certain point they granted limited access and we allowed the team to interview them we got very frank perspective about that but during this we used the media quite a lot and then we decided to engage to get this message across to high profile associations and individuals one of the associations we tried to meet was the University of New York women the scientists and professionals which was led by the wife of the vice chancellor and then we shared our message and they decided to collaborate with us and then which led to us hitting the street you see the images there that is when we started moving around the street to preach against this thing and then we started getting the findings to the general public so at the end there was an important outcome here please share the slide the government that was quite indenial of this kind of issues and challenges came up to set up a focus minister of water resources and sanitation which was the most ending or so and then there is also a high profile NGO operating around the state decided to visit the communities to actually find out if what were discussed which the communities themselves actually collaborated in spite of the effort to suppress their own perspective they stood by what we did so that kind of message led to government actually gradually responding by first setting of this please share the slide I know my time is almost off then what actually happens here is the lessons we have here in this kind of study we have multiple layers of power relationship we get that then we have to find a way of working one-on-one to get through our perspective from individual victims and so we build trust we build trust with communities if it were not possible the communities would have been forced to deny the report and our own findings would have been kind of demonized to the extent that they would only end up circulating in the literature, international literature so we also had a challenge of the media reporting focusing on the main headlines mothers of train, lactating mothers they ignore other elements of toilet a challenge, sanitation challenge generally well we actually understand which has to do with the nature of the media operation here which is mostly on commercial trying to get headlines that will attract money, some commercial values then something that focuses on real development so we had this kind of challenge but one way to overcome that was to actually build trust and share findings directly with the people and in one of those instances we engage in a local radio program thanks you and we took the message in a local language and we started a lot of thousands of phone millions of participants actually listened to the radio station but many calls came up raising a whole lot of issues raising many issues around this and also setting example that encouraging us to get to many other communities which we say well because maybe future kind of thing please the last what is actually happening is just a lesson in trying to get messages I think we focus on getting the local language very very important because we may report things in the broader literature using English language people don't actually understand and don't follow what we do and also building trust in local communities actually help us understand what actually goes on and actually can force the government to act and in this case that has been the case forcing the government to act on this matter thank you very much indeed for that thank you so much Emanuel I'm not sure if it was just me but you dropped out for just a few seconds but I think hopefully everyone heard most of your presentation it was excellent I have one question that immediately comes up for you and I was wondering if you could just say a bit more about your tactics for ensuring that women were involved in the project you mentioned it briefly but maybe you could say just a few more words about that yeah actually what we did was it was difficult to get women into large public meeting in communities highly supervised in one community at length 42% participated in order about 2% so what we did was we built trust and actually allowed in the first community allowed the community to actually grant us to work on a group group of women group of men and group of youth and mix and so but still we were able to gather quite enough but it was not quite okay we actually get to engage on one-on-one some victims identified women who have victims of these challenges and also others who can also support also the information that was where we had very detailed kind of conversations including so women and then for the other community we were able to they granted us to give access get access to few women leaders and that is during the interview that is how we were able to gather useful information because it was very sensitive if you ask they were like very sensitive it's a no-go area they are red flags but when we got to the few women they tried to clarify a number of issues which probably would not have been possible in a larger group so women leaders and women and secondly a team team composition was in fact almost higher higher than in a few work we had female participants both 50 the men were very limited because we knew this kind of thing affected women very well because we've been having full open conversations on this I'll put another question to you and then I also have quite a few questions for Bessie Laurence who we will come back to you and to Annika and Leonard but one more question for you that came up is whether or not you or how you or if you intend to cascade these outcomes so I think upscale this work to other communities in Nigeria this is very highly possible because even when we had phone and conversation local radio we had many issues brought up by local communities in other areas who said they pointed their own unique challenge about women being discriminated is very different so if you enter one community you see a different story you get to another community you see a different story and also our choice to be there which we said no our scope only covered what we because of limited funding that may be a research of the future which we hope probably the scale of if we can partner with local foundations or communities and also get some people to do studies because we've already we have some fellows in our project which we award and they're also investigating working on this topic so if we can get more because many many post-grad year students potential post-grad year students have had interest in working in this field so we hope we can use them to make in route and also we also hope after this project we may also get some opportunities to actually go more into some gaps that we've identified to fill in. Thank you and it strikes me it's quite interesting to have have heard from about the the InfoNile project and then your project and see the key role of media in both of those projects and the role of us potentially to be part of the advocacy process of course media outreach being very vital to your strategy in a way so that that was quite interesting to hear. Thank you very much. We have a couple or at least one question for Bessie and Florence so if I could ask you to come back to the stage there was a question about whether or not the service delivery plan caters for maintenance and if so who funds the maintenance which is certainly an interesting question. Yes so allow me to answer that particular question. What happened is that the rich program if it was in the interest of time that we compressed all the information actually has a maintenance project which is called fundi-fix that works to maintain or to ensure that the breakdown of the community water supply water points are actually repaired in less than 72 hours. So in this case that they have a funding model in which the government contributes a little of the fund and also the community water users and of course it gets some trust fund and it has actually worked with the communities to ensure that there is constant enrollment to expand the service to areas that are not covered and then that is in Kitui county and the same is being initiated in Turkana county and in the Turkana county the water service delivery model they are focused on ensuring that since there is an existing sewer utility for supplying carbon water supplies it focused on ensuring that there is optimized demand supply to service the existing infrastructure in which the company is responsible for of course maintaining that particular water supplies and we have seen the interest of communities wanting to adopt what it is in Kitui county where they subscribe to the fund fix model in which they pay a little amount but then the company delivers on the maintenance in case of a breakdown. If there is no of course breakdown they continue to pay for the future restoration of the scene. Thank you. There was another question also and I think it's kind of a broad level but maybe you can give us some share some of your wisdom and both of you about how you most effectively translate research findings into policy and action and again you touched on it a bit but maybe you have some wisdom you would like to share with everybody. Yes. I think the REACH program has actually been a model in terms of this project that led to policy impacts and it just began by us understanding the needs of our study area and the first thing we did was I mentioned the engagement but it went beyond engagement we had a field office where we had members of our staff available to follow up on the county needs and follow up on the water initiatives around the counties and also one of the important things was that we reviewed all the county development plans to ensure that we understood the context of water going into the future so when we carried out our research we also intended, apart from the scientific publications, we intended to have some input into their own development programs like for example they need to expand the resources to cover the communities that were not accessing the water we had to play a role there by showing them where the freshwater resources are because this is an area where we have largely saline brown water areas and so this guided investment so that you don't drill a well that is quite extensive and then you get saline water or it is contaminated in a way with high fluoride levels the other thing that we did on that round was to produce documents in small briefs to ensure that certain scientific products like for example aquifer delineation led to the stopping of the allocation of land to areas where there was, which is covered by the aquifer so this is the town which had development before planning that means it is sitting on its freshwater resources the water table is quite shallow the geology there is so sandy and it allows for contaminants to flow into the aquifer during the recharge periods and so those dynamics also spread all the way to the land governance issues urban planning issues and so it showed for us the need to develop an environmental monitoring plan which we co-developed with the county to ensure that everybody and all the stakeholders were involved in this to ensure that it is cross cutting and it will be accepted by the it will not be affected by the political changes because it is not defined by a certain period but then it is short term, long term, mid term and long term and it is working well for us and just to mention we co-developed the county climate change policy because the county approached the reach program to be able to help them have some inputs regarding the protection of the water resources because they saw that was going to be an important part of the climate impact in that note and I think just to add because there was a question on whether I could expand on the climate part let me just handle that as well the issue of climate change is quite significant because we have water in security driven in two dimensions the first one is that the water scarcity driven by the drought because it is in an urban environment but then in the wet season in the in 2020-2021 where we had COVID also there was a very huge flood event that happened in the area which disrupted or it washed away around nine municipal boreholes so there was a scarcity of water because there were no infrastructure but the infrastructure has been washed away so such dynamics required informed attention well I mean such a it sounds like such an amazing program and I have to say the point you just brought up in terms of the way in which it connects with land governance issues is a very important point and I think probably many of us on this call are very aware of the interconnectedness of many of the policy debates that you all are involved and engaged in so congratulations for that work we want to move on to just some few final questions for Annika and Leonard unfortunately we have quite a few questions still and I think we will not have a chance to get to all of them so I thank you all for your participation we have a couple questions first of all is it possible for for regions outside of East Africa to participate in the platform yeah thank you so much for the question and for the interest for now we are really focusing on the Nile Basin but we encourage anyone who is interested to be part especially of the webinar series the Science Wednesday program to join I will put a link to join our listserv in the chat and then you can be informed with our regular communications of when these happen a lot of the topics are not only relevant to the Nile Basin countries but could be relevant to other regions and occasionally we also bring in researchers or water professionals from other regions to share best practices that could also be relevant to the Nile Basin we also have some programs however that are Africa wide this is something we are venturing into especially as underwater journalist Africa beyond the InfoNile project in particular for example our most recent youth science communication competition was actually available for anyone any science or journalism student in Africa to participate and we had a lot of participation from West Africa and Southern Africa as well as the Nile Basin countries we're actually having the awards ceremony for this competition on Friday so we encourage anyone interested to join as well and yeah through Water Journalist Africa we're also embarking on establishing our network and our programs in other regions and journalists especially could always share stories to be published on the Water Journalist Africa website. Someone asked a very concrete question but I think it's an interesting one about language and how you deal with the difference in languages across the Nile Basin if that poses challenges and what strategies you have to deal with that. Yeah it is a big challenge and an opportunity it's a multi-lingual region so one of our main strategies of being able to work with journalists and scientists to speak different languages is working through our country coordinators we have coordinators and our team in all of the 10 countries 10 not 11 we have not yet reached Eritrea but these coordinators help us to translate all of our stories either from Arabic and Arabic and French to English or the other way around and sometimes we also support journalists to work in collaborations where maybe a national level journalist will be working with a community-based reporter reporting in a local language beyond even the main international languages of the Nile Basin so these collaborations also help us to be able to publish in local languages that we don't speak as staff and coordinators. For some of our programs like some of our main webinars we may provide live translation in some of the major Nile Basin languages however for some of the programs like the co-production program this was available only to English speakers and we recognize that this is a big limitation and it's something we have been talking about a lot as a team and we hope that we can consider providing more live translation even for the in-person programs even though it is resource intensive we feel that it's very important so thank you for the question and that's very relevant. And a couple people asked I mean you would address the issue of how do you involve scientists but is there a similar strategy for involving journalists or is that similarly not a problem there that that interested in being involved? Oh yeah thank you very much about that question yes we have several problems and this we have also generated for taking part several motivations that make this journalists apply for this several grants one of them is the passion because in order for journalists to report fully about a specific thematic area they are led by a passion some of these journalists are really passionate about water by diversity and environment issues so that is one thing then secondly at InfoNight we have our biggest strength with this training and mentorship yes this is something we train in several areas that are geneticism to mention but a few even water and others so they know that not only will they get that grant and maybe not only will they support the project but also they will get knowledge and skills in several other areas and we have tried as much as possible to support journalists to make sure that they can enhance their skills and knowledge in other factors of course maybe we understand that they need some little bit of support resources of course it's not so big we don't really have a very big budget to do that but at least we support them here and there but majorly it is the passion from the journalists and the training and mentorship that we offer at InfoNight and water generalism Africa great thank you I have a couple of questions actually back to Florence and Bessie so people are bringing up their questions so if you could return to the screen one very specific question was did you use ensemble techniques and groundwater modeling to provide up-to-date information about current groundwater conditions and how does the community respond to the proposed equitable groundwater solutions that you've developed so far? First of all Bessie has a technical issue and she is also teaching in a class in a moment so I'm going to respond the groundwater research I undertook the work it was part of my PhD work to investigate the groundwater resources in Lodwa and so I used various tools techniques in a slide that I showed how we did geological modeling and geophysics and also carried out seasonal water quality monitoring for the purpose of understanding the change and one of the findings we voted because of the dissolution and the play aquifact then on the isotope techniques we were understanding the sources of recharge into the aquifer and that's where we linked much of the recharge to be attributed to the perennial river in which of course the aquifer was just occurring within the Bessie and so we did also analyze the of the water and we linked high insulin water to non tritium burying groundwater and so that means that the groundwater in the area which we considered to be fresh is the one which is highly vulnerable to the climate change and also pollution because of the age of the water and then we developed the we didn't develop the numerical models because of the lacking and of course the water table fluctuation measurements in the area and what we did was to develop a conceptual aquifer model for the purpose of understanding the three subsystems that we have the shallow intermediate and the deep zones in which the shallow system much related to the surface water in the river and then what we have done or what we are doing as part of my post-dog activities is that we do not want to leave this area with the same baseline that there is no monitoring network so we had to implement some of the research outputs and one of those is that we are drilling six piezometers to be able to at least start the monitoring as part of the demonstration of how also the E-M-N-P that is the environmental monitoring plan which as a monitoring component could be implemented and so I was happy that the project would go that far to install the monitoring networks to monitor some water quality parameters and also of course the water levels, yeah. Well thank you so much Florence I'm going to wrap up here because we only have just a few more minutes and I want to say there are a lot of outstanding or several outstanding questions but of course this is symposium for several days and IIT Delft can put you in touch with each other and with the presenters to follow up on some of the very specific questions that are maybe not necessarily applicable to the whole group so this is not the only opportunity to get your questions answered but thank you all for posing these questions. I want to call on Merta who has been our repertoire during the last hour and a half and has probably been typing away vigorously. Merta would you be willing to wrap up the session by just bringing to four some of the conclusions are interesting observations you've heard. Yeah absolutely Thanks very much Feta and thanks everyone for your very interesting presentations it's a great honor to be able to wrap up this session which leaves me with the challenge of how on earth to summarize such as stimulating and rich set of presentations in a few minutes I just want to start with a quick anecdote I used to be a researcher myself used to be an academic and then I made the move to civil society because I wanted to become more engaged with researching a few years ago so I now work in the realm of advocacy and making that switch I completely underestimated just how much expertise and knowledge is required to do advocacy properly I'm still learning so I know I have experienced this sort of issue from both sides of the spectrum that we've been discussing here and I just want to quickly briefly and because of that I want to also underscore just how important places like this are where researchers can get together and discuss these types of issues because traditionally speaking academics and researchers aren't traditionally trained in the sort of dark arts of advocacy so there's a lot of learning to be done there, a lot of challenges and a lot of experiences to be shared so I'm really great that this event took place and you're all brave enough to share your experiences so we saw three very interesting presentations obviously it started with the GWS SENS presentation from Florence and Bessie in Takana and I really it was a very detailed water modeling research that was also linked to institutional engagement and community engagement and I really appreciate the centrality that you gave to the issue of inequality and tackling inequality and also establishing partnerships with the county and it's great to hear that you were able to actually that your research was able to reach to policy changes at the county level that's quite something and the next presentation after that was obviously the InfoNile project from Leonard and Annika very interesting stuff I really like this type of trans-disciplinary which is what it is essentially collaborations between academics and journalists in this sense which are not typically used to work together but actually kind of rely on each other I'd say to reach the types of impacts that they really tend to be working towards that also comes with all sorts of challenges and I really appreciate that you were reflected on those challenges including the sort of the distrust between between journalists and also between scientists this is something I'm sure you could have talked for a lot longer about how you dealt with these types of challenges and then after that we had the Washgender project from Emmanuel in Nigeria very interesting also I mean I really appreciate that you were able to really share these types of challenges and experiences that you had when trying to bring your findings out into the media and then bring it into the journalists and then suddenly you get caught up in this sort of this dominoes falling over of journalists taking it going viral, politicians taking it getting defensive, accounting out of being developed all these types of dynamics that you don't really have control over but it is kind of the scaring and messy political reality of advocacy so I really appreciate it and I'm also glad to hear that you were ultimately able to bring people together through those processes of public consultation and engagements so I mean just to wrap it all up I just want to say this really emphasizes the importance of this type of issue and the type of collaborations more collaborations between scientists, journalists also policymakers but also just to speak from my own perspective civil society and grassroots groups and advocates I really think there is a lot more to be gained by working together on these issues yeah I think I'm just going to keep it at that thanks very much for your free presentations and I really look forward to more of the sessions in this kind of touching on this theme, thank you very much Thanks Michael very important summary I'm really I'm really impressed by how much you're able to absorb from very fast presentations so thank you so much for that and I thank you also to Pate for moderating this our very first session of the symposium and thanks to all the presenters who made it here through all the tech tests for sharing your very rich experiences from the field which are so important for us to learn from in the water sector we are going to go into a 10 minute break now and the next session will be technology for impact we will start at 1535 CET but the session will remain live so you don't need to leave the call and come back if you don't want to and stay tuned and see you in 10 minutes Thank you everybody