Flowing with Community to Reclaim River Health.
“In just over a year, the community has taken complete ownership of the Drinkable Rivers Citizen Science programme,” says Violet Matiru, her voice glowing with appreciation and even a little surprise. “People are dashing up and down the tributaries of the Athi, making their Secchi Disks, measuring water quality for their neighborhoods. When I started, I had no idea how high the demand would be, how much people were waiting for this.” Violet is founder of the Athi River Community Network (ARCN), which facilitates citizen-led monitoring and advocacy projects along the banks of Kenya’s second longest river. Today, we’re here to learn from her expertise in tethering local and international organizations for mutual capacity development, linking river health and public health, and flowing at the pace of community to give the river back to the people.
ARCN x Drinkable Rivers… what’s the origin story?
Violet Matiru: What a journey it has been! I started out in the world of international governance, coordinating NGO input for UN conferences and the like. But I kept finding myself asking: “How is this changing my community’s lives?” So, in 2005 I co-founded Millennium Community Development Initiatives (MCDI), with the goal to transfer expertise from my international network to local community groups here in Kenya. With training, they can develop their capacity to self-organize and take effective environmental action. It quickly became clear to us that water quality and river health were central to the wellbeing of the surrounding land and people, so we decided to concentrate our various grants along the Athi River. The Athi flows through Nairobi and while the Tana River provides most of the capital’s water supply, the Athi River and receives all its pollution. We knew there would be much to learn and gain by connecting communities upstream and downstream into a robust association of Water Resource Users Associations (WRUAs): the Athi River Community Network. Soon after, I learned about the Drinkable Rivers citizen science measurement kit from a colleague at Both Ends in the Netherlands, and I thought, “Yes, we need this!” With the independent data from these materials, our ARCN groups can take ownership of our river’s health and bolster their cases for environmental protection.
What a journey indeed. So what does the citizen science programme look like today? How are people using the kit?
Violet: Essentially, we go where communities have issues. People are very concerned here… so for them citizen science is a powerful tool, not just a hobby. ARCN groups are dedicated to monitoring water quality – both for environmental resource management advocacy and for public health use. People know that polluted water feeding their fields means poor crop yields and unhealthy food. They know that contaminated drinking water means damage to body and mind. I remember when we posted a photo of us doing our first Drinkable Rivers measurement on Facebook, and neighbors started reaching out: “Please can you test my water? I think it’s making me sick.” In the realm of advocacy, we once supported ARCN members to bring an environmental complaint to court against a polluting steel factory. We won, and they had to close it down… but then they just moved it further upstream. With the Drinkable Rivers kit, there’s the hope of holding them accountable by measuring if and where they dump untreated industrial waste.
And all this in under a year of joining… impressive! What does the future hold?
Violet: Well, although many people already get intuitively that the health of rivers, land, and humans are all connected, more education and broader awareness building are still essential. For example, the government provides a whole long list of substances and parameters to test for in the water, but they don’t explain in simple terms what they indicate, what they do to your body.
We want to change that, so everybody can understand and take action. We’ve already gotten additional testing strips to use in education programs with schools, as well as a high-quality testing machine, purchased through a grant from IHE-Delft, to use in collaboration with the university in Nairobi as part of the RS-4C project on River Basins. The scientists there are very excited, of course… we have to keep reminding them, “Hey, this isn’t just your toy now, it belongs to the whole Community Network!” In the long term, I could envision us training an enthusiastic university student on all the aspects of the work: agroecology, inclusive water governance, river and public health, and the practical use of all the testing materials. Then we could support them to set up a much-needed independent water testing lab service.
Like fact checkers, but for water quality! What have you learned from building this multifaceted initiative?
Violet: When you’re working with a community, it’s a process: you have to move at their pace. Rush things or try to impose your own way of doing things, and you lose people. I tried to bring the ARCN groups in as soon as possible with the Drinkable Rivers kit, but I should’ve started even earlier, before I even got it, so that they could give their input from the ground up. Things may take longer in the beginning, but they will root deeper and grow stronger in the end, because the people make it their own. And that is really important, because water is political. I didn’t understand that when I started, just how political it is. You’re just doing your citizen science thing, and before you know it, you’ve stepped on the toes of some institution or another. You need a completely bought-in community to navigate these challenges with integrity and resilience.
It’s been an inspiration to hear your story… I can imagine the whole Drinkable Rivers network would feel the same. Any parting words for other (potential) hubs starting out?
Violet: Protecting our rivers can feel like a Herculean task, but it’s about learning to break it down into manageable pieces. The kit is a great place to start. And remember to bring your community along. We’re happy to share our best practices on this with other hubs – it’s so important to keep having these conversations. To keep walking this journey together.
Drinkable RiversTM CC 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License