Communities living by Lake Turkana in Kenya face fluctuating water levels and dwindling fish stocks. An UN project aims to improve water – and food – security.
00:00It's 6 a.m. close to the village of Moite at Lake Turkana.
00:06Achino Lubok and her friend Elizabeth Atapar are on their daily trek to collect water for their families.
00:16They must walk more than two kilometers to reach the handag shallow wells of the Moite River
00:21that are the only source of drinking water.
00:25They have to scoop the water carefully to avoid collecting sand.
00:31The water is not safe to drink, but they have nothing else.
00:38The water is not good because it's consumed by both the people and the animals and is always left uncovered.
00:46The water causes health problems in children and adults like diarrhea.
00:50When you go to the hospital, they diagnose you with things like typhoid or amoebic dysentery.
00:55Not far away, on the lake shore, people also struggle to find something safe to drink.
01:05Turkana may be the world's largest permanent desert lake, but its water is salty.
01:11And it's growing.
01:14In the last 10 years, it's eaten up some 800 square kilometers of land and villages, along with infrastructure built by international donors.
01:26Climate change is causing extreme rainfall in distant catchment areas, driving the expansion.
01:31Deforestation and farming mean the land retains less water, which has compounded the problem.
01:39Local people, especially the women, spend hours each day fetching water.
01:44We need help accessing clean water.
01:49We are forced to close our businesses to go fetch water, and during that time, we lose customers.
01:57The water we do get is dirty and tastes bitter.
02:03I urge the government to provide clean water for the health of both children and adults.
02:11A community water project was supposed to bring change.
02:15But, again, the water is salty.
02:19People use it for their animals, washing utensils and clothes, and, if there's no other option, even for drinking.
02:26An aid worker interviews Achino Lobok as part of a survey of local communities to find out exactly where people get their water from and how much they need.
02:39Project officer Anne Lilande says such community-specific experiences are vital if future projects are to succeed.
02:46So, right now, what we are doing, we are going to do a feasibility study to identify potential areas where we can intervene in terms of coming up with either boreholes or is it feasible to treat the lake water.
03:03Another project on another part of the lake in the town Luangalani supplies water to over 3,700 households, schools and businesses.
03:12But, even here, poor infrastructure management has led to leaks in the pipes, and the lake's rising water levels are causing more problems here, too.
03:27One of the paradoxes, we are talking about the lake, which is coming up.
03:31And so, we've seen quite a lot of infrastructure that has already been submerged because of the rising water lakes.
03:37And so, this is now becoming a challenge because just within a year, you can find quite a big difference.
03:44Today, you're able to access a particular site, and tomorrow that site is already submerged.
03:49Fishing is a vital source of income and food for about half a million people in the lake region, but it's been hard to develop a reliable fishing industry.
04:02The Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute is studying how the water and the fish stocks are changing as the lake expands.
04:09What we are doing, basically, is to collect fish data which will support, you can call it food security, collect water quality data to monitor how it changes, and then link this to the water quality data and the fisheries data, to see whether, if, where the water quality is good, how is the fish population, how is the fish species and many other things.
04:37Of course, an increase in the fish harvest would also require infrastructure to cool and transport the catch to reach markets farther away.
04:47For now, life on the shores of the unpredictable Lake Turkana remains hard.
04:52The hope is that the more precisely targeted aid interventions can make it easier for people to meet basic food and water needs for their families here.
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