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.

Moite

Communities living near Lake Turkana in Kenya are facing significant challenges in accessing clean water and adequate food. Residents must walk long distances to reach shallow wells, which provide unsafe water shared by both people and animals, leading to health problems such as diarrhea, typhoid, and amoebic dysentery. The lake itself, despite being the world's largest permanent desert lake, offers only salty water, and its expansion due to climate change and deforestation has submerged villages and infrastructure.

Efforts to provide clean water through community projects have been hampered by poor water quality and infrastructure issues, such as leaking pipes and submersion from rising water levels. Fishing remains a crucial source of food and income, but the industry faces difficulties due to changing water conditions and limited infrastructure for processing and transport. Aid organizations are conducting feasibility studies to better target interventions, with the goal of improving access to clean water and food security for local families.

Communities at Lake Turkana face water and food crisis

It's 6 a.m. close to the village of Moite at Lake Turkana. Achino Lobok and her friend Elizabeth Atapar are on their daily trek to collect water for their families. They must walk more than two kilometers to reach the hand-dug shallow wells of the Moite River that are their only source of drinking water. They have to scoop the water carefully to avoid collecting sand. The water is not safe to drink, but they have nothing else. The water is not good because it's consumed by both the people and the animals and is always left uncovered. The water causes health problems in children and adults, like diarrhea. When you go to the hospital, they diagnose you with things like typhoid or amoebic dysentery. Not far away, on the lakeshore, people also struggle to find something safe to drink. Turkana may be the world's largest permanent desert lake, but its water is salty. And it's growing. In the last ten years, it's eaten up some 800 square kilometers of land and villages, along with infrastructure built by international donors. Climate change is causing extreme rainfall in distant catchment areas, driving the expansion. Deforestation and farming mean the land retains less water, which has compounded the problem. Our people, especially the women, spend hours each day fetching water. We need help accessing clean water. We are forced to close our businesses to go fetch water, and during that time, we lose customers. The water we do get is dirty and tastes bitter. I urge the government to provide clean water for the health of both children and adults. A community water project was supposed to bring change. But, again, the water is salty. People use it for their animals, washing utensils and clothes, and, if there's no other option, even for drinking. An 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. Project officer Anne Lilande says such community-specific experiences are vital if future projects are to succeed. So 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. Another project on another part of the lake, in the town Luangalani, supplies water to over 3,700 households, schools and businesses. But, 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. One of the paradoxes, we're talking about the lake which is coming up, and so we've seen quite a lot of infrastructure that has already been submerged because of the rising water lakes. And so this is now becoming a challenge because just within a year, you can find quite a big difference. Today you're able to access a particular site and tomorrow that site is already submerged. Fishing 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. The Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute is studying how the water and the fish stocks are changing as the lake expands. What 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 where the water quality is good, how is the fish population, how is the fish species and many other things. Of course, an increase in the fish harvest would also require infrastructure to cool and transport the catch to rich markets farther away. For now, life on the shores of the unpredictable Lake Turkana remains hard. The 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. For more UN videos visit www.un.org

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