This Unequal Flow Museum project by Fredrick Mugira is the direct outcome of research, fieldwork, and creative development supported by the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) programme at the International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and they do not necessarily represent those of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Why I Built This Museum: Framework, Choices, and the Stories Still Missing
A reflexive note by Fredrick Mugira
The Framework: Agnotology, Infrastructure inequality, and the capability approach
This museum started not with a theory, but with a sight of a jerrycan that is impossible to miss across Uganda and much of Sub-Saharan Africa.
No matter where you look, you will see the jerrycan. They wait in long lines at community wells, rest on the heads of young children and women, or are seen tied on bicycles and motorbikes on dusty roads. The jerrycan has become a symbol of water inequality and broken infrastructure. When public water systems stop, the jerrycan takes over. It is a daily reminder of economic hardship in a continent that actually has plenty of natural freshwater. People have had to create their own ways to get water when government systems do not work. Watching these containers shape daily life across the continent inspired in me the idea for the Unequal Flow Museum.
Three intellectual frameworks shaped everything that followed.
The first is agnotology, the study of how ignorance is deliberately produced and maintained. This concept was developed by historian Robert Proctor (2008) and originally applied to the tobacco industry’s campaign to create doubt about smoking’s health risks. I applied it here to water journalism and governance, arguing that excluding community voices from environmental reporting is not an oversight but a structural feature of systems that benefit from keeping communities ignorant of their rights. A community unaware that water is a constitutionally protected human right will accept a pre-election borehole as a gift rather than demand it as an obligation. Ignorance here is not accidental. It is produced by media systems that default to elite sources, governance systems that never extend infrastructure to the communities that need it most, and a colonial legacy that drew Uganda’s water map for its own convenience and called it development.
The second framework is infrastructure inequality, a concept from urban planning, development economics, and literature on the colonial roots of service delivery gaps in African cities (Mamdani, 1996; Kooy and Bakker, 2008; Home, 2013). Dr. Maha Abdelrahim Ismail, a groundwater expert at the Nile Basin Initiative, gave me the clearest explanation during fieldwork. She noted that there are two types of water scarcity. Physical scarcity, where there is simply no water, and economic scarcity, where water exists but the infrastructure to access it does not.
Uganda is not physically water-scarce. It has Lake Victoria, the Nile, Lake Edward, Lake George, Lake Kyoga, and vast underground aquifers. What it lacks is the infrastructure that turns these resources into sources reaching everyone equally. This infrastructure gap is not natural. It results from decisions made over more than a century, starting with colonial administrators who built water pipes for their own settlements and left surrounding African communities to find their own way to water.
The third framework is Sen’s capability approach, as presented in his book Development as Freedom (1999). It focuses on what people can actually do and achieve. Sen argues that development is not primarily about income, infrastructure, or economic growth. It is about the expansion of real freedoms, mostly what people are actually able to do and be. In this case, a water tool, programme, or policy only matters if it widens human capability. The central question is not what resources people have access to, but what those resources enable them to do.
Applicable to my focus on water inequality, Sen’s framework raises questions such as: what does the person who finally gets piped water do that they could not do before? Can, for example, a woman in rural Uganda send her children to school on time because the morning no longer begins with fetching water? Can such a woman, freed from the twice-daily walk to the water source, now pursue the income or education that the walk to fetch water was consuming? These are capability questions. And they reveal something that infrastructure statistics, such as the percentage of households with improved water access, liters per capita per day, cannot. Therefore, tools and artifacts such as the jerry can in this museum are not simply a measure of what people lack. They are a measure of what they cannot yet do, cannot yet be, and cannot yet become because the hours spent carrying them are hours taken from everything else.
Why these frameworks
Agnotology explains why the problem persists. It clearly enlightens that communities kept ignorant of their rights cannot demand them. Infrastructure inequality explains where the problem comes from. It points to a colonial system built for some and never extended to others. And Sen’s capability approach explains what is actually at stake. According to this approach, what is at stake is not just water, but the full range of human freedoms that water access makes possible. Most coverage of water access in Uganda frames the issue as a development and climate change challenge that can be closed by investment, technology, and goodwill. That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete. It does not explain why the gap exists where it does, who benefits from its persistence, and whose knowledge has been systematically excluded from the conversations that shape water policy.
Furthermore, agnotology asks who is kept ignorant, by whom, and to whose benefit, while Infrastructure inequality asks who the system was built for, and who was deliberately left out? The capability approach asks what people can now do that they could not do before, and what they are still unable to do, and to be, because the piped water has not arrived. Together, these frameworks transform a story about water access into a story about power and freedom, about who has the freedom to turn on a tap and who has the freedom to send their children to school without first sending them to fetch water from a spring.
How the framework shaped the storyline
The three frameworks determined almost every editorial decision in the museum.
They determined why the museum opens with the jerry can rather than a statistic or policy argument. The jerry can is not a symbol I imposed. It is the infrastructure that communities built themselves in the absence of state-provided infrastructure. Through Sen’s lens, the jerry can is also a measure of capability. Every hour spent carrying it is an hour lost from school, paid work, rest, or other activities that make a free and flourishing life.
They also determined why I chose the locations and oral histories I did. For example, the contrast between fetching unsafe water and the industrial development bordering the River Nile, the world’s longest river, is a possible illustration of the gap between physical abundance and infrastructural inequality. It shows how poor people’s inability to access safe water directly constrains every other capability they might otherwise exercise.
They also determined why I built this as a museum rather than a news article. A museum is an archive. It preserves. I believe that the stories in museums matter enough to be kept and not just published and forgotten in a news cycle, but collected, curated, and made available as long as the inequality they document persists. The Unequal Flow Museum exists because Uganda’s water inequality and the capability deprivation it represents deserve to be on record.
Intended audience
This museum is built for three overlapping audiences.
The first is the communities it documents. These include the families carrying jerry cans in Jinja, Isingiro, Kampala, and Mbarara, as well as the millions of Ugandans in similar situations whose specific stories are not yet in these pages. For them, the museum is an act of recognition. It is a statement that their daily experience of water inequality is not invisible. It is also, I hope, a resource that provides them with the language, data, and historical context to understand and articulate their own rights. Sen’s framework is particularly relevant here. I believe that communities that understand their water access not just as a practical problem but as a freedom they are owed are better equipped to demand it.
The second is journalists and media organizations across Africa and beyond, and particularly those covering water, environment, and governance. For them, the museum is a model of what community-centered, solutions-oriented, historically grounded environmental journalism can look like. It is also a provocation to examine whose voices their own reporting centers and whose it excludes. The capability approach offers environmental journalists a powerful reframing, focusing not just on whether people have access to water, but on what that access or its absence enables or prevents them from doing and being.
The third is policymakers, development practitioners, and academics working on water access, infrastructure investment, and post-colonial development in sub-Saharan Africa. For them, the museum offers the faces and voices behind the statistics that policy documents rarely provide. And it offers a colonial history that makes clear why investment alone, without a deliberate commitment to expanding real freedoms for the most marginalized, will reproduce the same patterns it claims to address.
Limitations
The museum is geographically concentrated. It draws mainly on Uganda, specifically Jinja, Isingiro, Kampala, Sheema, and Mbarara. It excludes areas such as Karamoja, which is Uganda’s most water-stressed region. Likewise, the communities of the Albert Nile in the northwest and the fishing villages of Lake Albert are not yet included.
The museum centers on women and children, which reflects that they bear most of the water collection burden across sub-Saharan Africa. But this risks reinforcing a narrative where women are defined mainly by their burdens rather than their capabilities. Sen’s framework offers a useful corrective by highlighting not just what women are burdened with, but also what they can do and be when that burden is lifted.
The museum documents infrastructure inequality in detail but engages less with solutions. Communities across Uganda have built their own water systems, such as community boreholes, gravity-fed schemes, and rainwater harvesting, without government support. Their stories of self-organized resilience and expanded capability belong here but are not yet included.
The voices of water utility officials, government engineers, and policymakers are absent. This is a deliberate editorial choice. The museum exists to amplify voices most excluded from water governance conversations, not to add space to those that already dominate. But without institutional perspectives, the museum does not fully explore why the capability gap persists in policy, budget, and political decision-making.
The museum is in English. The communities it documents largely do not speak English. In the future, I will ensure translations into local languages so local communities can read about themselves and their communities.
Impact I am hoping for
I hope this museum contributes to a shift in how Uganda’s water inequality is covered, especially by moving it from a development statistic to a justice story, from a problem of geography and poverty to one of power, freedom, and political will.
At a deeper level, I hope it becomes a resource that communities can use to understand their rights, to document their own experiences, and to hold accountable the institutions that have failed to expand their capabilities. Sen argues that development is the removal of unfreedoms. This museum is an attempt to name the unfreedoms that Uganda’s water system imposes and to make the case, in the voices of the people living with them, that they are neither natural nor necessary.
At the level of journalism practice, I hope it demonstrates that inclusive journalism is possible in African contexts and that the communities living closest to the crisis have the most important things to say about it.
And at the level of policy, I hope it reaches the hands and screens of the people who make decisions about where Uganda’s water infrastructure investment goes, and that the photos they see and voices they hear in this museum stay with them long enough to matter.
Fredrick Mugira is an AFSEE Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a National Geographic Explorer and the founder of Water Journalists Africa, co-founder of InfoNile, and founder of the Apes Reporting Project.
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