Community, crisis, and the efforts behind flood-proofing in Turkana

In Turkana, one of the Kenya's arid northern counties, a water infrastructure breakdown reshapes every hour of a family's day. 

It was before dawn when Ekai Adamson, a teacher and long-time resident of Moruese village in Turkana Central, woke to find the floor of his home wet. By the time his neighbors had gathered their children and animals onto higher ground, the borehole that served the entire community was already standing in half a meter of brown, silted water.

It is a question that cuts to the center of life in Turkana County, Kenya's largest and most climate-vulnerable Arid and Semi-Arid Land region. Unlike most parts of the country, where rivers and rain can supplement water supplies, Turkana relies almost entirely on boreholes for everything: drinking, cooking, washing, watering livestock. When a borehole is compromised, there is no obvious backup.

And floods, paradoxically, are now among the most destructive forces in that water landscape. Communities like Moruese know this cycle intimately. Boreholes are drilled, communities come to depend on them, and after two or three predictable droughts and floods, the infrastructure collapses. The water committee runs out of funds. A repair contractor arrives months later, if at all. Then the walk starts.

In Turkana, fetching water is rarely a shared duty. It falls, overwhelmingly, on women and girls. When the borehole in Nawamor broke down eight months before the 2025 rehabilitation, getting water meant a three-hour round trip on foot to a shallow hand-dug well shared with cattle. During a flood or a breakdown, the effect of that labour becomes brutal. Women carrying 20-litre jerry cans navigate terrain that is waterlogged, unstable, and in rainy season often cut off by swollen seasonal rivers. Several women in the area run small enterprises: selling goods at market, drying and selling fish. When a water source fails, women replace working hours with walking, and their businesses stop.

In early 2025, Oxfam Kenya partnered with Davis and Shirtliff, one of East Africa's foremost water infrastructure firms, to rehabilitate twenty strategic boreholes across Turkana before the dry season peaked and flood risks mounted again. The initiative was designed to break the breakdown cycle: not by responding to a crisis already underway, but by rehabilitating infrastructure before communities had to go without.

The choice of what to build was itself a lesson learned from failure. Early guidance had suggested cylindrical borehole chambers, reasoning that rounded walls distribute hydraulic pressure more evenly. But field teams found a consistent problem: the curved geometry defeated local masons. Misaligned joints, weak seals, early deterioration. The square chambers the masons built with their own practiced hands were stronger, because they were built well.

This finding now shapes the recommendations coming out of the Turkana flood-proofing project: square chambers, locally sourced blocks, and a 1.5-2.0 metre chamber height above ground level that has proven, in repeated assessments, to be the threshold between survival and structural failure.

The interventions are layered. Above the masonry chamber, a lockable, corrosion-protected steel hatch secures the wellhead and electrical components. Around the base, drainage slopes and soak pits prevent the pooling that leads to apron deterioration. And beyond that, a chain-link fence marks a clear perimeter. Because flooding, the project found, has a secondary effect that is rarely discussed: it enables vandalism. Floodwaters physically reduce the distance between people and borehole infrastructure. Boreholes once inconvenient to reach become easily accessible in high water. Electrical components and wellhead cover disappeared from unprotected sites. The fence is not just a security measure. It is a climate-resilience intervention.

Back in Moruese, the flood has been gone for three weeks. The Moruese community borehole, one of the twelve rehabilitated under the Oxfam Kenya and German Federal Foreign Office flood-proofing project, stands behind a new chain-link fence, its chamber rising above the cracked clay ground.

Ekai Adamson walks past it on his way to school each morning. He notices that the water tastes cleaner than it did before the rehabilitation. He notices that the pump has not broken down since the rain came. He notices that most of the students are back in school. He notices that women who used to carry water from a distant point now fill their jerry cans here, close to home.

Most of the community are not sure of all the technical reasons why the borehole survived the flood when it did not before. The masonry walls. The raised wellhead. The drainage slopes. The locked hatch. The fence. The technician who checks before it breaks, and the committee chair who keeps the notebook.

They just know it works. And for them, that is everything.