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Water Wars: Ethiopia and Kenya

While Americans fret over rising gas prices and global tension over oil, the world’s poor are struggling to secure access to another, even more basic resource. Water scarcity in East Africa is fueling conflict and thwarting development while growing in step with local populations and rising global temperatures.

Though the actions of industrialized nations are primarily responsible for global warming, its effects are being felt most heavily in less developed regions of the world such as East Africa, where climate change can be tied to detrimental environmental issues such as droughts and melting snowcaps.

Colonial era treaties granting rights to water from Nile tributaries to Egypt are leaving Ethiopian farms without access to irrigation. As dry seasons grow longer in the arid plains of Eastern Kenya and Ethiopia, tribal conflict over access to watering holes is on the rise, exacerbated by the proliferation of arms from neighboring Somalia. With clean water access increasingly scarce, the burden of securing a daily water supply has become a daunting task for women and young children who often spend hours a day carrying water for their families from remote locations. Many Western aid organizations have focused their efforts on improving water access, with mixed successes.

Reporting from Ethiopia and Kenya, Seattle-based multimedia journalists Sarah Stuteville, Jessica Partnow and Alex Stonehill from The Common Language Project, Kenyan journalist Ernest Waititu of AfrikaNews.org and project intern and videographer Julia Marino of Ohio University take an in-depth look at East Africans' struggles for water and how the actions of Americans are both alleviating and intensifying the problem.

Ethiopia and Kenya: Water Wars is part of is part of the Pulitzer Center's interactive global climate change portal, "Heat of the Moment."
View all Heat of the Moment reporting here, and join the conversation.

Visit the CLP's East Africa Project page where you can see an interactive map of their journey.

Visit our educational portal, the Pulitzer Gateway on Water Wars for current updates to the reporting, including dispatches from the World Water Forum in Istanbul, and the opportunity to share your own story about water.

Sarah Stuteville

Sarah Stuteville is a print and online reporter with Seattle-based www.clpmag.org an award-winning nonprofit multimedia publishing house...

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Alex Stonehill

Alex Stonehill is a print, photo and video journalist with Seattle-based www.clpmag.org an award-winning nonprofit multimedia publishing house...

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Jessica Partnow

Jessica Partnow is an audio and multimedia producer with Seattle-based  www.clpmag.org an award-winning nonprofit multimedia publishing house...

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Ernest Waititu

Ernest Waititu, a native of Kenya, is founder and editor of Afrikanews.org. Waititu has worked as a journalist for the last ten years. He interned with the CNN International Desk in Atlanta and has written for The Standard, The Nation and The EastAfrican in Kenya....

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Julia Marino

Julia Marino is a master's student in photography with a concentration in interactive multimedia at the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University. She received her bachelor's with honors in magazine journalism from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in June 2007, and was awarded the John R. Wilhelm International Reporting Scholarship to work as the East Africa intern and Videographer for Seattle-based Common Language Project Magazine....

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