How do ordinary people understand, experience, and respond to the world?
Field notes, essays, books and images about how people live inside history, culture, and forces larger than themselves.
Counted Water / Kabale
The Water Her Mother Could Not Count On
In Kabale, southern Uganda, water engineer Kyokushaba Shine, 31, builds solar pumps and drip irrigation for smallholders after watching her mother’s onion harvests fail for lack of water — a company started in February 2025 with neither staff nor capital that has, she says, installed 30 systems in just over a year.
Read the Story →Illustrative / schematic only — solar panels used for irrigation on a rice farm in Nigeria (Wikimedia Commons / SMMIMAGES, Wiki Loves Africa 2025). NOT a photograph of Kyokushaba Shine, her company Winta Engineering Solutions, or any system installed in Uganda; not from The Guardian. Used to suggest the kind of solar-powered irrigation described in the reporting, not the Field Note subject.
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All Forces →Counted WaterFeatured Force
What happens when a harvest depends on water a household cannot count on — and a daughter trained as an engineer starts selling that reliability, plot by plot, while knowing water alone cannot restore soil already spent?
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