The Water Her Mother Could Not Count On

What she watched before dawn

KABALE, UGANDA · NOVEMBER 2026

As a little girl in Kabale, southern Uganda, Kyokushaba Shine watched her mother rise before dawn to tend onion acres near their house. The harvests were the family’s only income. They often failed. A lack of water, or soil already degraded, could leave almost no yield, and not enough food on the table.

These details were reported by Stefanie Glinski for The Guardian on 2 November 2026, in a dispatch also bylined by Valentine Benjamin, Sarah Johnson and Kenneth Zindondo. This Field Note is a secondary editorial account of that reporting — not an original interview.

I started my company with the goal of designing small and affordable irrigation systems for smallholder farmers. When I started the business in February 2025, I had neither staff nor capital, but I had a goal in mind and I wanted to work towards it.

What one year of systems has reached

Now 31, a water engineer and entrepreneur, Kyokushaba has made it her mission to help farmers like her mother. Winta Engineering Solutions designs and installs mostly solar-powered pumps, paired with drip irrigation. The company digs boreholes where needed and trains farmers to run and maintain the systems.

In just over a year, she said, Winta has installed 30 water systems across Uganda, most of them solar-powered, and more than ten for female farmers. About 80 percent of her team are women. She has begun connecting farmers with local microfinance lenders, who offer loans of about five million Ugandan shillings (about £1,000), usually repayable in two years.

What water alone cannot restore

Reliable water is not the whole problem. She also runs educational programmes on how the climate crisis and soil degradation affect a farmer’s ability to grow food.

Farmers want results fast, so they use fertilisers to increase their yields quickly, but sometimes that means they don’t protect the health of their soil. It’s not enough to have sufficient water if the soil is degraded, and that’s why we have started working on awareness campaigns.

She told Glinski that creating opportunities for women still matters in a sector largely dominated by men. She has a five-year-old daughter; it is just the two of them. She wants that daughter to know that women and girls are strong.

What remains open

Glinski’s 2 November 2026 reporting settles the remembered onion acres, the February 2025 start without staff or capital, Kyokushaba’s account of 30 systems, a mostly female team, the loan size, and her warning that water is not enough if the soil is spent. It does not settle how many of those systems will keep running, whether soil campaigns can catch a fertiliser rush, how far beyond “more than ten” female farmers the work will reach, or what kind of sector her daughter will walk into.