Oxford University Vice Chancellor's Research Engagement Award: Johanna Koehler part of winning REACH team

The REACH programme on improving water security for vulnerable people in Africa and Asia recently won the 2024 Oxford University Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research Engagement. This award is testament to what the global team of researchers and practitioners achieved over the last decade improving the water security of over 10 million vulnerable people across Africa and Asia and especially with all the partners in the research hubs in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh.

Living in poverty often means a struggle for water security. Rapid urban growth, unregulated pollution from industry, extreme floods and droughts, lack of reliable and safe drinking water, and increasing damage to water ecosystems threaten economies and undermine the lives of the poor. Improving water security is an important pathway to sustainable development and poverty reduction. Therefore, the REACH programme, hosted at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford and funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, has been working on improving water security in Africa and Asia by:

• generating new evidence on water security through an innovative, interdisciplinary, risk-based approach;
• establishing science, practitioner and enterprise partnerships to ground research in approaches that will benefit vulnerable populations;
• building capacity and networks for the next generation of water managers and scientists in Africa and South Asia.

Our colleague Dr. Johanna Koehler has been part of the REACH team for the full duration of the programme focusing especially on the work in East Africa, including roles as Research Associate and Programme Manager of the Water Programme during her eight years at the University of Oxford, and more recently as research partner while expanding her work on water security based in the Netherlands at VU Amsterdam and Wageningen University. Dr. Koehler is a co-founder and trustee of an innovative model for drinking water services in rural areas of Kenya, called FundiFix, now serving over 80,000 people with reliable water services. Her research on sharing water-related risks between the public and private sectors and communities also contributed to Kenya’s Water Act 2016, and more recently to Kitui County’s Water Bill. This action research contributed to some of the core objectives of REACH, including advancing thinking on the risk-based approach and promoting the science-practitioner-policy interface.