By Kimberly Henrickson
Medill News Service, May 27
For many Chicagoans, the city’s waterways are a source of beauty, leisure and entertainment. With the Chicago River slicing through downtown and Lake Michigan forming the city’s eastern border, the area is inextricably linked with its famous water features. That is true of Kenya as well.
The North American Great Lakes share many similarities with the African Great Lakes, a water system in eastern Africa that includes lakes that drain into the White Nile, Congo and Zambezi rivers, as well as closed basins. The African Great Lakes region touches ten different countries.
During the week of May 4, Northwestern University hosted a group of delegates from Kenya’s Ministry for Water, Sanitation and Irrigation. Kenya has access to Lake Victoria and Lake Turkana, both of which are part of the African Great Lakes system.
The visiting diplomats enjoyed Chicago’s beautiful waterscape during a downtown river cruise, met with Northwestern administrators and shared their work to Northwestern students. The visit was part of an ongoing partnership between the university and the East African nation, spearheaded by Northwestern anthropologist Sera Young, revolving around the development and promulgation of Young’s WISE Scale for measuring water insecurity. The visit aligned with Chicago Water Week 2026 presented by local water innovation hub Current, and with Northwestern’s 1oth Annual Transboundary Water Symposium.
Celebrating Chicago’s coast
According to the U.S. EPA, the Great Lakes account for about 21% of worldwide surface freshwater, defined as low-salinity water that sits on top of land and is surrounded by land on all sides. Approximately 10% of the U.S. population and 30% of the Canadian population – more than 30 million people in total – get their drinking water from the Great Lakes, says the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office for Coastal Management.
Celebrating the Great Lakes was paramount to Chicago Water Week, which included policy talks, events and showcases. The week’s purpose was to “encourage all residents to recognize the importance of protecting our water resources and supporting innovative solutions for water sustainability,” wrote Mayor Brandon Johnson in a proclamation issued May 3, 2026. “I grew up on the Great Lakes, so I really appreciate them,” said Kalindi Parikh, Current’s strategy director. “I work in water now because I want to protect this resource, not only for myself but for future generations to come.”
Lake Michigan has served as a vital life source for its human inhabitants for thousands of years. For the many Indigenous communities that lived in the area, the lake facilitated trade, transport and intertribal interaction. Indigenous tradition often centers water not as a resource, but as a sacred, life-giving element to which humans owe a reciprocal obligation to maintain.
“As an Indigenous woman, we value nature,” said Edith Freeze, the founder of the Pachacamak Foundation, a Chicagoland environmental advocacy organization rooted in Indigenous traditions. “Nature is sacred. Water is sacred.”
Young delivered opening remarks honoring the delegates. Guests enjoyed views of the local architecture while discussing ongoing water issues and projects involving Lake Michigan and the Chicago River.
“When people go to the Galapagos, they see new species and are mesmerized,” said Freeze, who was born in Ecuador and was a guest on the cruise. “I had the same feeling when I came to Chicago.”
Wise people and a WISE scale
The five visiting diplomats discussed global water issues with students and academics.
The Kenyan delegation included Ismail Shaiye and Thuita Mwangi, both expert advisors to the Kenyan President and Cabinet Secretary for Water on issues involving water infrastructure and governance. Both men previously worked as high-level executives at Kenyan water management organizations.
The African Great Lakes account for more than 25% of world surface freshwater, and support more than 50 million people in 10 countries, according to the African Center for Aquatic Research and Education. However, a 2024 article published in Springer Nature estimated that 40% of the Kenyan population lack access to safe water.
The Kenyan partnership with Northwestern involves the WISE (Water Insecurity Experience) Scales, a suite of tools Young developed to measure water insecurity. The WISE Scale was initially developed for use in Western Kenya, and allows researchers and policymakers to quantify the accessibility, usability and stability of water sources.
The WISE scale is now used worldwide. “These scales have been tested and used in 80 countries across the globe, and have been able to assist in policy direction and resource mobilization,” Mwangi said. The scales are open-access and have been used to identify correlations between water insecurity and demographic identifiers, health outcomes and other social inequities. “Governance is the most difficult issue to fix,” Shaiye said. “If I was to use these tools to implement a water project, it would make a huge difference in governance and accountability,”
The delegation met with Northwestern’s deans, president and provost during the visit. “We are here to experience the use of advancements in technology, research and data collection, particularly on water insecurity, food insecurity and wastewater insecurity,” Mwangi said.
Shaiye described the visit as a “priceless” opportunity to build relationships with Northwestern graduate students, who may later work in Kenya. “The sky is the limit,” Shaiye said. “My job is easy when you have a partnership like this.”
On Wednesday, May 6, the Evanston campus hosted its 10th Annual Transboundary Water Symposium on “Water Security in Israel, the Middle East, and Africa: Regional Solutions for the Climate and Water Crisis.” The symposium was hosted by Northwestern’s Center for Water Research and the university’s Israel Innovation Project. Over the past ten years, these two institutes have hosted faculty exchanges, joint research projects and an annual undergraduate class studying water issues in the MENA (Middle East and Northern Africa) region.
“Transboundary” can refer to political borders, sectoral borders or geographic borders. Featuring brief talks from multiple academics, the symposium focused on the complications of water governance when one body of water is within the jurisdiction of more than one nation. Aaron Salzberg, a former special coordinator for water at the U.S. Department of State under President Barack Obama, delivered the Symposium’s opening remarks, “Freshwater insecurity is almost always the result of mismanagement driven by politics and poorly functioning institutions,” he said.
Transboundary issues abound in global water management. Lake Michigan is the only Great Lake entirely in the United States: all others have significant shorelines in Canada. Kenya shares Lake Turkana and Lake Victoria with neighboring countries Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania. Only 29% of the 63 international transboundary river basins on the African continent have cooperative frameworks, said Professor Grace Oluwasanya of the University of the United Nations Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Oluwasanya attributes this to fragmented governance and weak cooperation between nations.
Additionally, climate change will further destabilize water regimes because plans are often based on predictive assumptions, which today do not remain reliable, said Dr. Akintomide Akinsanola, an assistant professor jointly appointed at the University of Illinois Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory.
Salzberg pushed back against a popularly touted prediction that “the wars of the future will be fought over water.” In many of the MENA region basins relevant to the Symposium, he said, the upstream country is a hegemon that is able to use its access to water as a tool for exerting control over the downstream nation, the marginalized party in the relationship. This power dynamic means forced cooperation is a more likely outcome.
“It’s hard to win a war over water,” Salzberg said. “You might be able to do something to destabilize countries’ relationships in the short-term, but to win a water war, you probably have to secure those resources, which is not an easy thing to do.” However, Salzburg acknowledged that there has been a recent uptick in water conflicts, particularly at the local level, and that water has been used as both a weapon and target.
The symposium’s speakers emphasized the importance of securing safe and accessible water for all. Dean Brian McKinley Jones Brayboy, Northwestern’s first Native American dean and a citizen of the Lumbee tribe, unknowingly echoed Freeze’s statement from the cruise. “I would argue that water is a human right. It is Nature’s gift to the planet,” said Brayboy, who is Dean of the School of Education and Social Policy. “I hope that we will find ways to treat it with a real sense and spirit of abundance, even as we think seriously about the importance of having it, and its security.”
More perspectives from cruise guests in the video. (Video by Kimberly Hendrickson/Medill)
Photo at top: Sera Young (far left) of Northwestern’s Center for Water Research honors the visiting delegation from Kenya’s Ministry for Water, Sanitation and Irrigation on a Chicago river cruise on May 4, including Thuita Mwangi (second from left) and Ismail Shaiye (second from right). [Kimberly Henrickson/Medill]