Africa’s Lakes Under Pressure: Lake Turkana, Lake Victoria and Lake Naivasha

Lake Victoria is the largest lake in Africa, and Lake Turkana is the largest desert lake on Earth.

Lake Naivasha in Kenya is much smaller than either of them. Even so, a documentary on The Green Channel about it recalls the explorer Joseph Thomson describing it in 1883 as “a moving mass of waterbirds.”

All three lakes are in East Africa, and all three are under pressure from the people who depend on them most. Giving Nature a Voice, a documentary series made by filmmakers in East Africa, has spent its first four episodes on these three lakes. This guide walks through each lake and the episodes that tell its story.

Lake Turkana: fed by a river from another country

Lake Turkana sits in the desert of northwestern Kenya, but its water comes from somewhere else. Nearly 90 percent of its freshwater inflow arrives down a single river, the Omo, from Ethiopia.

In 2015, Ethiopia began filling the reservoir behind the Gibe III dam, which at 243 metres is the tallest dam in Africa. In June 2018, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee placed Lake Turkana National Parks on the List of World Heritage in Danger, citing the dam and the Kuraz irrigation project upstream. The Committee reported a rapid overall decline in water levels since the reservoir began filling, and it said seasonal fluctuation patterns had been heavily disrupted.

The lake has not followed a straight line since then. UNESCO notes that its levels can fluctuate by up to eight metres per decade, and in 2026 Mongabay reported rising water around parts of the shore. Mongabay also reported that around half a million people now depend on the lake’s fishery for food and income.

The first episode of the series, Water to Dust, follows what the threat to the lake means for the people who fish it and for the pastoral communities whose grazing land has gone. The film raises the Aral Sea, the Central Asian lake that shrank after its feeder rivers were diverted for irrigation, and asks whether Kenya is about to watch the same thing happen. Water to Dust was made by Narissa Allibhai and Mitchelle Jangara.

Lake Victoria: Africa’s largest lake

Lake Victoria is shared by three countries. Tanzania holds 51 percent of it, Uganda 43 percent and Kenya 6 percent, and more than 42 million people rely on the lake as their main source of food, employment and clean drinking water.

The lake’s best-known environmental story began with a fish. In the 1950s, the Nile perch was introduced to Lake Victoria to boost the fishing industry. When its numbers surged in the 1980s, the Nile perch drove more than 200 of the lake’s endemic cichlid species to extinction.

The series covers Lake Victoria in two episodes, both directed by Benj Binks with a team of journalists from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The first, Ziwa Victoria (Part 1): Searching for Fish, reports on the lake’s ecological crisis through the people closest to it, including fishermen, a fishers’ union, fisheries experts and a cage fish farmer.

The second, Ziwa Victoria (Part 2): Tainting the Shores, looks at what reaches the lake from the land around it. 

Indigenous rainforests have been replaced with palm oil plantations, artisanal gold mines leach mercury, pesticides are used without control and sewage flows into the water. According to the film, all of these contribute to oxygen depletion in the lake and to the spread of water hyacinth, which is choking it.

“If we are not taking pollution seriously or we are not taking climate change seriously, somehow, in the next millennium, Lake Victoria will be dead,” says Peter Mireri of Friends of Lake Victoria in the film. 

The episode also looks at possible solutions to save the lake.

Lake Naivasha: a lake that changed within a lifetime

Ornithologist and Naivasha resident Don Turner remembers the lake in the 1960s. “It was a bird watcher’s paradise,” he says in the film Resilience: Fish Eagles of Naivasha (Part 1). “And people who came here just simply couldn’t believe it.” Sarah Higgins of the Kenya Bird of Prey Trust remembers the water itself. “The water was absolutely clear,” she says. “If you went fishing, you could watch the fish following your lure in.”

According to the film, the lake began to change in the early 1980s with the growth of two industries that need a lot of water: horticulture and geothermal energy. Greenhouses for flower farms went up along the shore, drawing water directly from the lake. 

People arrived for the jobs, the lake level dropped and sewage from the town flowed in. The nutrients fed algae blooms that drew oxygen out of the water, and fishing, legal and illegal, grew as more people needed to eat.

The lake’s fish eagles adapted. As the water dropped, the film shows them perching on hippos to get their food. The episode is presented by Kenyan-born raptor scientist Dr. Munir Virani, who sets out to explain why the eagles are managing despite the pressure on their lake, and how their home could be saved. The story continues in Part 2.

What the three lakes have in common

In each of these places, the pressure comes from things people need, such as power, food, work and water. 

That is also why the films spend so much of their time with the people living on the shore, from fishermen and farmers to gold miners, scientists and conservation groups. They are the ones who see the change first.

Who made these films

Giving Nature a Voice says it has trained and supported young filmmakers in East Africa to produce more than 50 documentaries on the region’s environmental crises, with audiences on Kenyan prime time television and in schools, museums and local communities.

The episodes on our platform were produced with the Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications in Kenya, and their funders include the Sitka Foundation in Vancouver. 

The same executive producer, Andrew Tkach, is also behind Voices From The Roof Of The World, a sister series made by filmmakers from the mountains of Asia. Its first three episodes, Bears on the Brink, The World Has Changed, and The Flying Horse,  are also streaming on our platform.

Watch Giving Nature a Voice online

Giving Nature a Voice is streaming now on The Green Channel, the environmental documentary streaming platform. 

You can watch the episodes in order, starting with Water to Dust, then Ziwa Victoria (Part 1): Searching for Fish, Ziwa Victoria (Part 2): Tainting the Shores and Resilience: Fish Eagles of Naivasha (Part 1).

Watch Giving Nature a Voice on our platform today.