We’re All Working on Water. Why Aren’t We Working Together?

About this event

About the session The people working on water already know water is a crisis. The problem is that they rarely work together. Someone is improving sanitation in an informal settlement. Someone else is financing watershed protection. Another person is designing irrigation systems for smallholder farmers. A utility advisor is helping a city think about climate adaptation. A community health worker is responding to waterborne disease. A rural infrastructure organization is trying to get reliable water to communities far from the nearest road. They are working on different parts of the same system. But we have organized them into different fields. WASH. Conservation. Agriculture. Public health. Climate adaptation. Urban infrastructure. Rural development. Finance. Each has its own institutions, funding streams, professional networks, conferences, vocabulary, and measures of success. The consequences of that fragmentation are practical. Watershed protection that could reduce flood risk and strengthen drinking-water security can sit in conservation budgets disconnected from the utilities that depend on it. Sanitation investments with significant health and resilience benefits can be treated separately from climate adaptation. Irrigation can be discussed as agricultural development without enough connection to watershed management. Communities experiencing water insecurity encounter multiple institutions addressing individual pieces of a problem they experience as one interconnected system. Climate change makes those divisions increasingly difficult to sustain. Flooding, drought, contamination, ecosystem degradation, sanitation failures, agricultural water stress, and unreliable drinking-water systems interact. A solution in one part of the system can create benefits, or unintended consequences, somewhere else. So this session will not spend much time establishing that water matters. It will ask the people already working on it to do something harder: Figure out why we keep working around each other. Which institutional mandates prevent collaboration? Which funding structures reinforce silos? Where does professional specialization help, and where does it become a barrier? Which connections across WASH, conservation, agriculture, utilities, health, and finance would produce the greatest gains if we deliberately built them? And what would a genuinely cross-sector response to water and climate look like if the people working across the system designed it together? Discussion Group Leaders Daniel Mwakameka is Executive Director at Action for Environmental Sustainability, advancing community-led environmental stewardship and conservation across key ecological corridors in Malawi. Katrina Straker is Sr. Director, External Relationships at Global Water Center, mobilizing partnerships and resources that strengthen local capacity to sustain safe water systems worldwide. Mark Huelsenbeck is CEO at Impact Water, expanding access to safe water in schools and communities across Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda. Susan Davis is Board Member & Author at MAMA HOPE, advancing community-driven and locally led approaches to philanthropy and global development. Kelly Latham is Global Advisor, Climate and Water Resources at Water For People, advancing climate-resilient water resources and sustainable access to safe water. Kate Cincotta is Executive Director at Saha, advancing reliable clean water access for rural communities in West Africa through locally operated water services. Valerie Foulkes is Associate Director of Philanthropy at Plant With Purpose, expanding philanthropic support that helps smallholder farmers reduce poverty while restoring degraded ecosystems. What to expect A working session for water practitioners rather than a general introduction to the water crisis. Participants will bring examples of where sector boundaries have helped or hindered their work and collectively identify some of the most consequential gaps between different parts of the water ecosystem. The goal is to move beyond calls for “greater collaboration” and get specific about what prevents it: institutional mandates, funding restrictions, professional incentives, different evidence standards, incompatible timelines, and the simple fact that many of the people who should know each other do not. Just as importantly, this is an opportunity to start building those relationships in the room. Who this is for This session is for WASH practitioners, watershed and conservation specialists, irrigation and agricultural water professionals, urban utility advisors, rural water infrastructure practitioners, water finance specialists, community health and resilience workers, and anyone working on one part of the water system who needs stronger connections to people working on the others. What you will get out of it A clearer map of where fragmentation across the water sector creates the greatest costs and where stronger connections could have the greatest value Honest discussion of the institutional mandates, funding structures, and professional incentives that keep related work separated Ground-level perspectives from sanitation, irrigation, watershed protection, rural water access, health, finance, and urban utilities Practical ideas for how governments, funders, and practitioners could create better incentives for cross-sector collaboration New relationships across parts of the water community that rarely have the opportunity to work together