In February, a press release shared some wonderful news: Dr. Sera Young and colleagues received a £250,000 (approximately $310,000) grant from IMMANA to develop a household-level water insecurity scale. This award will allow partnerships between collaborators working in the Shamba Maisha study in Kenya, Amber Wutich et al.’s Global Ethnohydrology Study, and Wendy Jepson’s water work in Brazil, among others. Since we received the grant, our team has been thoughtfully using the awarded research dollars to implement the HWIX survey across a wide variety of field sites.
“We are so excited to be working towards the creation of a scale that can finally measure how water insecurity affects people at the household level — that is, the food people grow, their economic well-being, and, of course, their health,” Young said.