Once upon a time, Europeans would turn up in emerging countries with mega-infrastructure projects meant to help people. They were well-meaning, but often deaf to what the local populations wanted or needed. Times have changed and, as you’ll hear in this third episode of Waterproof, more and more, the locals run the show! More about the people you’ll hear in the show below:

So, I bike through Amsterdam with Floris Boogaard of Deltares, where gardens and flood prevention measures are put in by the city and then maintained by Amsterdammers.

In Ghana, water projects are consulting village elders to make sure the plans align with their needs – and maybe even benefit from their local knowledge. In the coastal town of Ado, I joined a meeting of Dutch and Ghanaian advisers – among them the bright young lady Priscilla Dahdah whom you’ll hear in the podcast – with 27 local village chiefs in the town’s only big building, which doubles as the church. The church also runs a school, with classrooms clustered around a courtyard. The kids loved having a surprise visitor, they even sang for me!

And as a massive, but slow new Delta Plan gets underway to control flooding in Bangladesh, I speak with Chris Zevenbergen of the TU Delft about small-scale projects implemented by locals that have benefits for their people right now. Locals in the Lead!