Water Journalists Africa blog

The Water Journalists Africa blog was set up in March 2011 under the auspices of UN-Water Decade Programme on Advocacy and Communication. Member journalists have been posting about ten news items a month about African water and sanitation issues.

Recent articles have reported about a US$ 60 million loss for the Northern Region Water Board in Malawi and the lack of impact of the Water for African Cities programme in Kenya.

Water Journalists Africa training in Cape Town, March 2011. Standing at the left is facilitator Dick de Jong (IRC). Photo: Andrea van der Kerk

The United Nations Office to Support the International Decade for Action ‘Water for Life’ 2005-2015/UN-Water Decade Programme on Advocacy and Communication (UNO-IDfA/UNW-DPC) trained founding members of Water Journalists Africa network in March 2011 in Cape Town, South Africa, during during the official World Water Day 2011 celebration.

Web site: waterjournalistsafrica.wordpress.com/

Aguanomics: Dr. David Zetland’s blog on the economics of water (and some other stuff)

David Zetland has a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Davis, USA (2008) and is now a S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at UC Berkeley. He has been blogging daily on water, economics and politics at aguanomics.com since 2007.

While most posts deal with water issues in the USA, Zetland also maintains an interest in water issues in developing countries. This is probably a result of his travels to about 70 countries.

Water By Numbers – Peter Gleick’s blog

Pacific Institute president and international water expert Dr. Peter Gleick has started a blog “about the water challenges facing California, the West, and our world” in April 2009. In his blog Gleick explores “the threats and challenges to our freshwater resources” and discusses “available, viable solutions to those threats, drawing from not only [his] experiences and viewpoint, but also by way of numbers”. In each post Gleick includes “an important, unusual, or newsworthy water number” to highlight some piece of the water issue.

The number is Gleick’s first post was the “one billion people without access to improved, safe, or affordable drinking water”.

Go to the Water By Numbers blog.

Charity: water No. 1 in Water Twitter Top Ten

With over 300,000 “followers” on Twitter, New York-based charity: water reaches by far the largest audience in the water sector, a search in Twitter’s yellow pages, Twellow, reveals.

Twitter is a free micro-blogging service that lets users send and receive short messages via the web or mobile devices. Water charities, especially in the United States, have embraced the “SMS of the Internet” to communicate with their supporters.

Charity: water’s huge following on Twitter is not surprising. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (650,000 followers) promoted charity: water in his September 2008 Twitter newsletter.

By hosting “Twestivals” simultaneously in 202 cities around the world in February 2009, charity: water’s supporters helped raise over US$ 250,000 for water projects. And two months later when actor Hugh Jackman pledged to donate A$100,000 via Twitter, charity: water took home half of the prize thanks to a lobby by its followers.

In the “Water Twitter Top Ten”, UNICEF USA’s Tap Project campaign takes up second place behind charity: water with a “meager” 7,000 followers. The only non-charities in the top ten are the advocacy group Food and Water Watch and a company promoting rainwater harvesting. At no. 10, we find WaterAid UK, the only non-USA-based organisation. See the full top 10 below.

Further down in the Twitter water rankings, US-based charities and NGOs remain the dominant force, especially those whose sole or main function is fundraising. Organisations from the government, private and academic sectors, seem slow or reluctant to jump on the Twitter bandwagon.

Sanitation is poorly represented too: World Famous Toilets has 910 followers on Twitter, while the World Toilet Organization (WTO) has attracted a mere 31.And so far, there are no “tweets on water” being sent from developing countries.

View the Water Twitter Top Ten here and a longer WASH on Twitter list, by organisation-type, here.

RiPPLE blog

An initiative of the 5-year RiPPLE programe (Research-inspired Policy and Practice Learning in Ethiopia and the Nile Region). The RiPPLE blog aims to “initiate debate, invite comment, stimulate creative thinking and push forward [water and sanitation] sector learning in Ethiopia and Nile region countries.

Discussions focus on the following main topics:

• Ethiopia Water Sector Progress
• Learning and Practice Alliances
• Mapping for equity
• Supporting Nile-region learning
• Sustainable sanitation delivery
• Understanding water and growth