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In February, a visit to Nairobi and Machakos County, Kenya, for the RS-4C programme conference brought together teams from Kenya, India, Ethiopia, Mali, and Burkina Faso — and an opportunity to present a hydro-ecological governance map of the Athi River Basin. The conference included field visits to communities along the upper Athi — the Gatharaini Water Resources Users Association restoring polluted riverbanks, and citizens working to protect the fragile Ondiri quaking bog. Through maps, puzzles, and people, one idea kept returning: a river is one connected system, and no part of it can be understood without the people who live beside it.
In February, I spent about ten days in Nairobi and Machakos County, Kenya. Four days went to the conference; the rest I spent along the Athi River — surveying, walking its banks, watching, and learning from those who live beside it and depend on it. This was not my first time on the Athi. In late 2024, I had spent about fifteen days surveying the river — and returning felt like picking up a conversation that had stayed with me.
The work is part of a larger programme — Remote Sensing for Community-driven Applications: from WA+ to Co-learning (RS-4C) — led by IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Netherlands, and funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the Water and Development Partnership Program. The programme includes work in the Krishna River Basin in India, Lake Tana in Ethiopia, pastoral regions in Mali and Burkina Faso in the Sahel, and the Athi River Basin in Kenya.
During the conference, I presented a hydro-ecological governance map (Draft 2.0) of the Athi River basin — a product of that first field survey and subsequent online research.
The map covers the full basin — the Athi–Sabaki–Galana River system — tracing the river from the Aberdare Highlands and the Nairobi region through Machakos, Kajiado, and Makueni counties, across the Tsavo landscape, all the way to the Indian Ocean near Malindi.
It brings together many layers — rivers and tributaries, dams and sand dams, swamps and springs, industrial areas such as cement factories and limestone mines, towns, farms, protected areas including Nairobi National Park, Amboseli, and Tsavo, and county boundaries. One pattern stood out: water storage structures sit on smaller tributaries, not on the main river channel.
Seeing everything within one basin boundary makes something simple visible — this is one river, one connected system, where what happens upstream shapes what happens downstream.
When I presented the map at the conference, it sparked an important correction — the county boundaries I had used turned out to be inaccurate. It was a reminder that ground knowledge, held by people who live and work in a place, is irreplaceable. No map is complete without it.
Mapping is piecing things together. This idea carried naturally into a team activity that the MCDI team had so carefully and conscientiously prepared. MCDI had made a large puzzle representing the Athi River community — and somewhere in it, among the many, were Solomon, Violet, and me. It was humbling to find ourselves welcomed not just as outside observers, but as part of the community.
We all worked on it together. Slowly, the fragments came together to reveal the larger picture. It was a simple exercise, but it said something true — that rivers, landscapes, and communities are all connected. And so are the people working to understand them.
As part of the conference, we visited several locations along the upper reaches of the Athi River around Nairobi. We met many communities — especially young people — working to clean and restore the river. Their determination was visible everywhere. The Gatharaini Water Resources Users Association and the communities around Ondiri Swamp are just two examples
The Gatharaini Water Resources Users Association had cleaned sections of the Gatharaini riverbank and reclaimed them as spaces for the community — holding on to the hope of a healthier river, even while standing beside waters that run black, choked with waste, making that dream feel very distant.
Not far away, the Ondiri Swamp told a different but equally determined story. Ondiri is a quaking bog, forming the headwater of the Nairobi River, which eventually flows into the Athi. We were taken across the bog by local citizens and community groups who have worked for years to protect this fragile wetland.
Standing on the quaking bog was like nothing I had experienced before — it felt like a trampoline beneath our feet. Young citizens spoke about their efforts to protect it — what they had done, what they were still trying to do. We exchanged ideas on how useful data could be gathered without relying on expensive equipment.
Their dream of a clean river felt both urgent and impossibly distant.
And then, that same day, we encountered a strange sight. A zebra stood at the edge of the black, polluted river — grazing, calm, unbothered. For us, zebras belong to the wild, to protected areas, to landscapes untouched by human activity. Seeing one so casually settled in this poisoned, human-dominated stretch of river sparked disbelief, even delight. In India, it would have been a stray dog.
In my next post, I trace the Nairobi River — hidden springs, polluted waterfalls, and what the river carries within it.
