Goabaone Jaqueline Ramatlapeng vividly remembers when she would go without water from domestic pipes for days. Growing up in Kopong, a small village in Botswana, Ramatlapeng, her family and those in surrounding villages faced a similar plight: water scarcity. And when the water did flow, it was salty.
“People would go to the river to fetch water there, even though it looked brown and was unsafe for drinking,” said Ramatlapeng. “They had no choice.”
Those experiences were formative for Ramatlapeng. For the last eight years, they've driven her desire to help Botswana preserve its water resources as the country's first female hydrogeochemist.
Through her National Geographic-funded Okavango Water Insights project, Ramatlapeng leads water chemistry and quality research in the Okavango Delta, the largest freshwater wetland in southern Africa. It’s also known as the “Jewel of the Kalahari.”
“Botswana doesn’t have a lot of surface water; roughly 80% of the country is covered by the Kalahari Desert,” said Ramatlapeng, who graduated from UC Davis with a Ph.D. degree in earth and planetary sciences in 2024. “The Okavango Delta is an ecosystem that supports not only wildlife and plant life, but it supports human livelihoods in the region.”
Why the Okavango Delta matters
Ramatlapeng is not only studying the processes threatening the delta’s near pristine water quality, but she’s also researching how Indigenous knowledge from local delta communities can be harnessed to co-create better and inclusive water management policies in the region.
“Most people just know the delta for its beauty — the wildlife, the plants, the water — but there are people there too and I always give them credit for taking care of this system for thousands of years,” Ramatlapeng said.
The Okavango Delta is a transboundary river basin. Rainwater in Angola collects in the highlands and flows via rivers through Namibia before settling in Botswana. This water never reaches the ocean and most of it evaporates.
“Ninety-six percent of the water coming in from Angola is lost to the atmosphere,” Ramatlapeng said. “What we are seeing in the delta is just less than 4%. It’s a highly vulnerable system.”
Ramatlapeng and her colleagues are conducting high-frequency, long-term water sampling projects to track the health of the Okavango Delta. They’re trying to figure out how the delta's waters have remained pristine despite facing obstacles such as upriver pollution.
Monitoring water quality, climate change and the future of the Okavango Delta
Already, the team has deployed six monitoring stations across the delta, with dataloggers at each location recording flow, water quality and atmospheric conditions.
“In 2021, through the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project, we actually saw pollution in the Namibian section during COVID,” Ramatlapeng said. “A lot of people were bathing in the river, washing clothes; there was waste everywhere; and there was actually foam on top of the river with like a bad smell.”
The circumstances worried Ramatlapeng. Would she find remnants of this pollution in the water chemistry of the delta?
“For the first time, I got scared for the delta because the dirty water was going to travel down into it,” she said.
Sampling, however, showed that the water quality in the delta remained near pristine. Dilution from the Cuito River was its saving grace. Ramatlapeng said that freshwater from Angola and tall grasses called papyrus in the region filtered the polluted water flowing from Namibia.
“That grass is acting like a kidney,” Ramatlapeng said. “It’s packing out bad chemicals, but there’s a threshold to everything. The question is, what will happen to the delta’s waters when the grass dies out?”
Climate change, pollution, invasive species and increasing water demands are putting further strain on the Okavango Delta. Ramatlapeng hopes that education can be another saving grace before it’s too late.
Combining Indigenous knowledge and modern science
Modern science isn’t the only tool Ramatlapeng and colleagues use to understand the Okavango Delta. They’re also conducting knowledge exchange sessions with local communities located along its waters. The sessions allow the researchers to demystify their science for the local community members while also providing an avenue for the community to provide their input about the ecosystem.
“I’ve never seen an opportunity for people to voice out their traditional ways of taking care of this system,” Ramatlapeng said. “I’m trying to amplify their voices so that when we come up with policies that they’re represented because that’s how sustainable conservation comes about.”
The goal is to facilitate a co-creation of solutions that value both modern science and Indigenous knowledge, ensuring stewardship from key stakeholders.
Ramatlapeng has conducted these knowledge exchange sessions since 2024. She found that while many of the meetings were predominantly attended by women and children, the conversations were dominated by men.
“There’s a need for empowerment,” said Ramatlapeng, who decided she needed to set an example. “Let me put myself out there so that they see me as a woman doing this work in science. Those girls will grow into women who are going to be more vocal.”
This outreach work led to Ramatlapeng being named by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands as one of its 2026 Women Changemakers.
Inspiring the next generation of water champions
The power of storytelling has not been lost on Ramatlapeng. To help usher in a culture of conservation at the grassroots level, she’s authored a children’s book titled Water Champions: The Secret Lif of Yamasa the Raindrop.
The book explores the water cycle, freshwater conservation and environmental stewardship. Through collaboration with the Botswana Ministry of Basic Education and Child Welfare, Re Jala Peo and Nkashi Trust, Ramatlapeng has also facilitated water education and science engagement activities to almost 250 students in 16 schools.
A new storytelling project aims to further extend the reach of Ramatlapeng’s message of conservation and research to a broader audience.
Starting this August, filming will commence on a National Geographic Society-funded documentary titled “Tuning into the Heartbeat of the Okavango Delta Waters.” The film, which will be directed by award-winning filmmaker Tumie Sejo, will focus on Ramatlapeng’s project in the delta.
Ramatlapeng said the project provides another opportunity for collaboration, something that is sorely needed to protect and preserve a resource as large and critical as the Okavango Delta.
“Climate change is not stopping; it’s ongoing,” Ramatlapeng said. “We have monitoring stations across the delta, but we need to keep checking on them. We need to keep traveling to people, talking to people and doing more outreach.”
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