Ferial Adams: Championing Citizen Science for Clean Water

Ferial Adams, founder of WaterCAN (Water Community Action Network), is a longtime environmental justice activist with a PhD focused on citizen science. She explains how a R200 water-testing kit lets ordinary people verify contamination in their own water, giving them evidence to challenge municipalities and validation for illnesses they’d long suspected were water-related.

She discusses funding constraints, an activist training school, and her own path from South Africa’s Department of Foreign Affairs, where she grew disillusioned with elite entitlement, through an environmental master’s and work on citizen air-quality monitoring that first showed her science’s grassroots potential.

She reveals how water mafias extort community river-cleanup workers, and how what she calls the “borehole bourgeoisie” buy their way out of water crises.

Ferial’s five-year vision is a thousand trained WaterCAN activists holding municipalities accountable nationwide, alongside a broader cultural shift toward valuing and conserving water. She closes with a call for supporters, funding, and volunteers.

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Behind the Conversation

by Babette Gallard

Testing for Truth

Water is something most of us only think about when it stops coming out of the tap. I had never heard of Citizen Science and had no idea how important it is that we all understand the value of water and the responsibility we all have for making sure it is clean. What I found most inspiring was Ferial’s vision of a thousand ordinary citizens across South Africa regularly testing water and holding municipalities accountable. Not waiting for someone else to fix things. Not assuming somebody else is in charge. Just people, armed with information, refusing to look away.

After all, if safe water is a basic human right, why should proving that it isn’t safe fall to the people who are already suffering from it?

Watch Ferial protesting for the right to water in Johannesburg