How trust in science played a pivotal role in water resource management

The people you look up to as a child can have a profound impact on your future. For Dr Augustina Alexander, it was doctors:

“What I saw as a child is that when you get sick, you go to the hospital, see the doctor and then you're fine,” she recalled. “That was a great inspiration to me.”

When Augustina was just 8, she told her family she wanted to study medicine so she could be a doctor one day. Her mother, who was an accountant, told her that to achieve her ambition, she needed to take science subjects at school.

This was the first step in a journey that would ultimately lead Augustina to research water resource management in a highly competitive water region. In fact, she dealt with water scarcity in her town growing up. But for now, she was set on pursuing medicine.

Then in high school, she made a discovery that changed her career path: She realized that her real aptitude was for physics — not biology. That aptitude meant she would be better suited for engineering than medicine.

The next hint of an obstacle came from a tutor.

Is there a place for women in engineering?

“My tutor was about to start university and told me there were no women in his class taking subjects like environmental engineering,” she recalled. “He seemed to be implying that women could not excel in this field because they weren’t studying it.”

But the idea of pursuing a male-dominated specialty did not put Augustina off — it had the opposite effect: “This gave me a big push! I thought, ‘OK, I need to change this.’”

Childhood struggles with water

Augustina went on study at the University of Dar es Salaam opens in new tab/window, Tanzania, taking courses in civil and water resources engineering. She soon fell in love with the field, finding herself transported back to the challenges she had experienced as a child in her local community:

This was a field I could relate directly to. I’ve seen the issues of water becoming diseased and the challenges most women in rural areas face with water and sanitation.

I grew up in a town where tap water was always available. But then there was a time when the water just stopped. We had to carry buckets to a distant village to get water, joining a long queue of people.

When access to water suddenly stops, you soon realize how much of your life functions on the availability of it.

Competing needs for water in Rufiji

Augustina’s research has focused on water supply and treatment, hydrological modeling and climate change. Since 2020, she has been working on a major project investigating water resource management in the important Rufiji River Basin opens in new tab/window catchment.

The Rufiji catchment has a huge number of competing claims for its precious water. It serves the population in many nearby cities and towns. It is an economically significant power source, with one of the country’s biggest hydropower plants located downstream. The area is agriculturally significant, known as the national breadbasket, with small farms and large plantations all needing water to produce food. The river also flows through Ruaha National Park opens in new tab/window, one of the world’s largest wildlife sanctuaries, supporting animals in desperate need of water to live.

As part of a research consortium of African universities, Augustina looked into how best to manage this complex and significant resource:

Any approach to water use needs to balance competing needs and be able to withstand climate variation and the stress created by a growing population.

An unusual collaboration gives water users shared responsibility

The consortium, part of the Africa Research University Alliance Water Centre of Excellence opens in new tab/window consortium, aimed to unlock Resilient Benefits from African Water Resources (RESBEN) opens in new tab/window. To best manage water usage, they wanted to give all water users in the catchment a shared sense of responsibility:

We wanted the people who used the water to feel like they owned the process. It was important they start thinking about how they could use water in a better way.

The consortium brought various stakeholder groups together to help each understand the water needs of the others. This was a gradual process:

We started forming teams and getting them to look at why it’s important we share this water resource equally. We helped them understand what they need and what they see the future looking like. We discussed ways of different users working together to achieve their various objectives.

Augustina attributes the success of these discussions to the sensitive way they were managed:

We didn’t bring people together and just tell them what to do. We got them to talk to us about what’s happening with the resource — because they are the ones living there. Once they started sharing in their words what was happening, we could try and give the scientific explanation for it.

With so many different stakeholder groups involved, it was also important to create an environment where everyone felt comfortable to share:

We created clear rules of engagement. We wanted everyone to feel able to speak up. For example, some smallholder farmers in the groups may have found it hard to articulate their views. If they can’t share, we lose the opportunity for them to challenge our findings.

One technique to get around this was creation of storytelling sessions:

We created short videos. In these sessions we used the stories of the people in the village to explain their challenges around water and how it affects their wellbeing. We worked using a level of communication that everyone can understand.

These collaborative community sessions have had very positive outcomes:

Earning scientific trust

The success the consortium has achieved with stakeholders did not happen overnight. It took time to earn their trust in the process and scientific intervention, Augustina explained:

You might think, of course they should trust what we’re doing, it’s for their good. But it doesn’t just happen instantly. In the first workshops we held, many participants were very reserved — they were unsure of each other’s motives. By the final workshops, they were talking comfortably and even referring to each other's situation. They were making connections with how one action could affect everyone else.

Augustina attributes some of this change and sense of collaboration to a mapping session, looking at how the activities of each stakeholder impacted the others:

That really opened things up. They were so engaged and really started sharing their views. The participants started developing their own ideas around activities they could stop doing, or helped point out gaps in our knowledge about what was happening.

Collaborating globally for the future

Augustina would like to have more capacity to look into water resource use across the country. As part of this, she would love to see more students enrolling in fields relating to water and sanitation:

Once we have more people working in this area, their research can add into the efforts to solve the many water challenges. I’m so passionate about the research work I’ve done around the Rufiji River catchment. We want to take it a step further and implement the framework we are developing. If that can be put into policy, perhaps it can be implemented at a higher level to help manage and develop our water resources in different catchments.

“I want to see if I can help influence policies and regulations that support governance of water resources,” she added. “This could allow everyone to be able to share benefits.”