York University PhD Researcher Completes Nearly Half a Year of Water Justice Data Collection in Freetown, Sierra Leone

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone -- After five months living and working in Freetown, York University PhD candidate and Dahdaleh Global Health Graduate Scholar Brian Mahayie Waters has completed nearly half a year of community-based data collection examining water access and insecurity in three of the city's most densely populated informal settlements: Cockle Bay, Dworzark, and Portee Rokupa.

Supported by SSHRC, the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, and Mitacs, the project fielded a team of eight community-based surveyors who are conducting over 600 household surveys every month and completing bimonthly mapping of all 300 water sources across the three communities. The communities were selected to reflect Freetown's geographic diversity, from low-lying coastal areas to hillside settlements, as well as their varying relationships with local government and their mix of public, private, and community-managed water infrastructure.

"I have a strong background in quantitative research methods, and I want to employ them as rigorously and thoroughly as possible to find their real limits," said Waters. "While grappling with those limits, I'm employing the qualitative, ethical, and relational research methodologies that EUC has taught me to critically engage with those limits and push the water security research just a little bit further."

The study deploys the Household Water Insecurity Experiences (HWISE) scale alongside original survey instruments, JMP standards, and water source interviews, pushing these state-of-the-art tools to their quantitative limits to explore both what they can reveal and where even their best measurements fall short. All eight surveyors were drawn from the study communities themselves, grounding the data collection in local knowledge and ensuring a level of community trust that is rarely achievable through outside research teams alone.

Waters arrived in Freetown in October 2025 and returned home in late February. The study will continue through November 2026, capturing seasonal variation, price fluctuations, and source failures in ways that one-time assessments cannot. The resulting dataset is expected to contribute to ongoing debates at the United Nations and in global water policy circles about how water security is measured and what even the best available tools cannot fully capture.

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