Covering Joburg's water woes

View this email in your browser A curio giraffe made with clay from the Thukela River. Photo: Sean Christie Dear Reader Barely a day goes by that Johannesburg's struggles don't make the news. Perhaps the main long-term existential threat to South Africa's largest city is water, or the lack of it. For the past year, we've been doing in-depth coverage of Johannesburg's water supply, including the city's battle to stop leaks, and the sustainability of the city's supply from the Lesotho Highlands. For his work on this, in particular his story Follow the water: tracing Lesotho's uncertain water supply to Johannesburg, Sean Christie won the 2025 Sikuvile Print Features award.  Sean recently visited another source of Johannesburg's water, the Thukela River in the Drakensberg. He and Tladi Moloi have published these stories on GroundUp: How two very different South Africans are solving their water problems  In photos: The spectacular but contested Drakensberg source of Johannesburg's water The real cost of Johannesburg's water It costs a considerable amount of money to publish stories like these. There are reporter salaries, travel and accommodation costs, and editing and fact-checking. We can only do in-depth reporting like these with your support, for which we are deeply grateful. We are a non-profit news agency that focuses on human rights-related stories. We don't run ads.  Please consider supporting GroundUp by making a donation today.    Regards Nathan Geffen and Barbara October GroundUp's Editors Donate to GroundUp Woodstock Dam with the Tugela-Vaal canal in the foreground and the Drakensberg in the background, which was commissioned in 1982, and has a storage capacity of 373-million cubic metres. Photo: Sean Christie Residents of Rookdale live in touching distance of the Tugela-Vaal Canal, in which several people have drowned, yet they have no access to its water. Instead they depend on old community boreholes, rivers and sources of unknown provenance, like this one. Photo: Tladi Moloi Copyright © 2025 GroundUp, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you subscribed via our website or requested your address to be added to our mailing list. Our mailing address is: GroundUp Suite 08SB, 1st Floor, South Block, Tannery Park Belmont Road, Rondebosch Cape Town, Western Cape 7700 South Africa Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.