Our first stop on the bus journey from Nairobi to Nanyuki was on the edge of the East African Rift Valley with a misty view of Mt Longonot. A place that most geography students only know from their introductory lectures as a prime example of the formation of rift valleys and the shifting of tectonic plates. But the field school we attend is not just about looking at landscapes or observing the structures of cities, it's about practising how to do research in the field.
In the previous semester, we prepared ourselves - some of us in Bonn, some in Nairobi - and often exchanged ideas virtually. We had courses on the theoretical background of political ecology, the methods that can be applied in the field, and most importantly, we worked on our research proposals on Water Governance issues in rural Kenya. The groups were made up of students from different institutions and study programmes: the Master's programmes in Geography and Geography of Environmental Risk and Human Security at the University of Bonn and the United Nations University. The students from the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University had different academic backgrounds ranging from urban planning to history. The research seminar itself - Water Governance in Rural Kenya - was led by Prof. Dr. Detlef Müller-Mahn and Dr. Eric Kioko. It was linked to the ongoing Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) Future Rural Africa, which is jointly managed by the universitiesof Bonn and Cologne, together with partner institutions in Africa. Müller-Mahn and Kioko are principal investigators in the CRC, which facilitated our access to the study region in Kenya. We would like to thank the lecturers who prepared us and organised this extraordinary field school. Special thanks go to John Mwangi (PhD candidate at the University of Bonn), whose knowledge and contacts were crucial to the success of our research projects.
After six months of regular hybrid meetings, we – the students from Bonn and from Nairobi - finally met in person for dinner in Nairobi on the first day of our field school. We initially spent three days in the bustling Kenyan capital. To get an overview of the city, we climbed one of the tallest buildings in Nairobi. The continued presence of colonial planning in today's city structure could not be overlooked – for example, the divide between neighbourhoods resulting from racial segregation.
Later, we visited the Korogocho informal settlement to learn more about local environmental projects and the role of international governments and NGOs in them. The visit was made possible by Valentine Opanga, who is currently doing her PhD on the area with Prof. Müller-Mahn. This was an experience that is difficult to prepare for and reflect. In hindsight, we discussed ethical concerns about our visit, including positions of whiteness and privilege – invading a space as outsiders and observing the private lives of locals. Nonetheless, the experience sparked an in-depth discussion about global and regional inequalities and highlighted the ambivalent impact of development projects.
To get an overview of the national level of governance, we visited the office of the Water Resource Authority. Their perspective on the current debates in water governance was an insightful start to understanding the local realities in the following weeks.
The next day we left Nairobi. After our first stop on the edge of the African Rift Valley, our bus journey took us to Lake Naivasha. The lake and its surroundings are highly contested socio-ecological systems. During a boat trip, we discussed some of the most pressing conflicts in this area, which are developing around access to the riparian land. For decades, flower farms and tourism have depended on access to the lake. This has led to the dispossession and displacement of pastoralists who depend on access to water for their livestock.
After a long day, we arrived in Nanyuki, the starting point for our research projects in the following week. Nanyuki is a town at the foothills of Mount Kenya, the main “water tower” in the region. Travelling through the catchment area of the Ewaso Ng'iro River, we got a sense of the diversity of ecosystems at different altitudes and the importance of water for the rural region. We saw invasive plants (prosopis juliflora) that were originally introduced as windbreaks to protect farms, but are now spreading across the landscape and increase pressure on water availability in the region.
We split into five groups for the next week. Each group went to a different sub-catchment to investigate their respective Water Resource User Associations (WRUA). Two groups travelled to Timau, one stayed in Nanyuki and the two groups (to which the authors belonged) went to campsites in rural areas around Nanyuki. Fully loaded with camping gear, we squeezed into a pickup truck and a “matatu”, a local bus. We left Nanyuki in the middle of a heavy tropical downpour. Fortunately, it didn't rain that day south of Nanyuki, where we left the tarmac road.
With the last light of the rapidly setting sun, we pitched our tents. One group moved into the garden of a lodge in the Burguret sub-catchment, the other camped next to a training centre of the local WRUA in the Naru Moru/Tigithi sub-catchment.
We were finally able to start the research that we had been preparing for months. The group from Naru Moru focused on the relationship between national policy, WRUAs and water users. In the following week, we tried to understand whether WRUAs can be seen as an instrument of resistance to national policy or as an instrument for implementing regulation at the local level. The group from Burguret was interested in a feminist perspective on Water Governance. We sought to explore how women participate in WRUAs, how their socio-economic background influences participation and whether their access to water is affected. A WRUA is a community-based organisation operating in a sub-catchment. As people's livelihoods depend on the availability of water in the river, water has to be shared between upstream and downstream users in times of scarcity. WRUAs should resolve conflicts between different parties along the river, regulate the amount of water to be abstracted and implement rules for issuing licences.
Before diving deep into these complex issues, we first had to ask a few general questions: How do people get access to water? Which actors are involved in its distribution? What do people expect from the WRUA? Thanks to John Mwangi, all groups were first able to meet the chairman of their respective association. We then split into smaller groups to conduct household surveys, focus group discussions and participatory mapping exercises. For several days we walked up and down the sub-catchment trying to understand how power revolves around water and its distribution.
Very quickly the groups realised that the WRUAs were not working as well as their officials presented them. Most people were very willing to talk to us about their struggle for access to water and to be heard in the political fight for water rights. We established relationships with some of them in the course of our research, which also helped us to establish further contacts.
Every evening, while we cooked ugali, a local dish prepared of maize flour, we discussed our experiences and insights and developed a deeper understanding of the local power structures. However, our conversations were not limited to this. We discussed structural inequalities in the academic world between students and scholars from the Global South and North and our positioning and justification for coming to this rural place in Kenya.
The day after the fieldwork ended, we had the opportunity to present our findings to a mixed group consisting of scientists from the research institute CETRAD, local representatives of the water sector and some special guests we had met during our research. A memorable highlight was an elderly woman’s advocacy for equitable water distribution in one of the WRUAs. She took the opportunity and gave an impassioned speech confronting the water agency representatives with her personal and collective struggle for water and the unequal distribution due to power inequalities in water governance.
We ended the practical part of our research seminar as we had begun it over a week before: with a joint dinner. This was followed by a series of farewells between the students from Bonn and Nairobi as they headed home or continued their journey through Kenya and neighboring countries. We are delighted to have had the opportunity to work with such a diverse group of people and to have made many new friends. To conclude this article, we would like to express our sincere hope that our Kenyan colleagues will have the opportunity to visit Bonn to continue the aim of this research seminar as a joint project against the global imbalances in the academic world.
Text by Ole Heiland, Tim Schreck and Felix Brentrup
