Whenever heavy rain falls in eMbo, on the outskirts of Durban, Balungile and her children sleep with the windows open.
More than three years have passed since torrential rain caused her neighbour's retaining wall to collapse onto their home. The house has since been rebuilt. The wall that collapsed has not.
"Whenever it rains, I cry," she says. "Because I never know what is going to happen."
Researchers measure how much rain falls during an extreme weather event and map the extent of flooding using satellite imagery. Hospitals record deaths and injuries, while epidemiologists — scientists who study how illnesses and diseases spread among humans — estimate how many people become anxious or depressed or develop post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental health condition that can occur after someone experiences something extremely frightening or life-threatening.
Yet the measurements cannot tell us what it means to spend every rainy season waiting for another wall to fall or why two neighbours who survived the same disaster recall it in different ways.
As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of floods, droughts and storms across Africa, the personal experiences of what researchers call “extreme weather” matter. They help us understand not only the number of people who are affected but also how people make sense of what has happened, how they recover and what kind of support they need.
The project we’ve been working on is trying to figure out just that.
The Wema project, short for the impact of extreme weather events on the mental health of vulnerable populations in Africa, spans Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa. It’s a transdisciplinary project, which means we are pooling knowledge from a wide range of backgrounds: climate scientists, epidemiologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social scientists, government officials and community members as research partners.
It combines different kinds of evidence — from large-scale household surveys that show the patterns in numbers, to personal stories and artworks that capture lived experience — to build a fuller picture of how extreme weather affects mental health. Central to the project is the idea that people who have lived through floods, cyclones and droughts can contribute knowledge and expertise that complements scientific evidence.
That’s where we come in.
We’re digital storytelling facilitators. The workshop-based research approach helps people create their own forms of evidence — a true, short story about their experience through their own eyes by creating pieces of visual art to accompany their words.
Making space
Since early 2025, 37 women and men from marginalised communities across the four countries have worked alongside the Wema research team as paid community researchers.
They have shared their experiences as well as helped our team find answers, explain what the results mean, talk to researchers and decision-makers and shape what happens next.
While collecting a blood sample or completing a survey can take minutes, listening to and understanding the realities and depth of people's experiences takes much longer. People need time to make sense of experiences that may have been frightening, painful or deeply personal and to decide for themselves what they want to share.
Our community researchers were supported by community engagement teams that are based at local research institutes. Engagement teams know the languages and culture, which is essential to the creation of spaces comfortable enough for the community researchers to share personal stories with university academics and with one another.
Mental health professionals are also part of the team; talking about traumatic experiences can trigger strong emotions, so support was available during the workshops and after they ended.
Creating stories
We arrived at the African Population and Health Research Centre in Nairobi a few days early to train the Kenyan community engagement team in the digital storytelling method, and to meet our community researchers from the informal settlement of Mukuru kwa Reuben.
On the first morning we stood together in a circle and checked in. The workshop began with conversations about the meaning of extreme weather and mental health. The community researchers told us what extreme weather meant in the place where they live.
Around the room, we had pinned handwritten questions to the walls; tables were covered with paper, paints, glue, magazines and coloured pencils.
Tell us a true story about a time in the recent past when you experienced an extreme weather event that affected your mental health.
We would like to understand how the way you were thinking or feeling influenced your ability to get through that event.
Is there anything that stands out in your memory — something that happened, or something that you or someone else did — that made it more difficult or easier for you to cope?
The questions were designed to encourage the community researchers to focus on a single experience, built around a profoundly memorable moment, rather than trying to describe everything that had happened. The questions asked them to reflect on how flooding affected their lives, their homes and their families as well as what followed and what helped or hindered them when trying to cope.
Over the next five days, the research centre, usually a place of science and technology, became a creative environment where people could reflect and share stories they had rarely spoken about before. They listened to one another, asked questions, offered encouragement and helped one another bring out important details. They wrote, drew, painted and finally recorded their illustrated stories on digital tablets to produce short videos.
Across four workshops, held over six months, the community researchers in each country shared stories that took us into homes, fields, hospitals, schools, churches and temporary shelters. Through 37 individual digital stories, they described moments of terror and loss — some lost homes, others family members — and the decisions, relationships and acts of bravery and care that shaped how people coped in the aftermath of climate shock.
Collapsing walls, flooded fields
In South Africa, Balungile remembered standing outside her home, unable to reach her children as the wall began to collapse. She thought they might be dead. Years later, whenever dark clouds gather, she listens for sounds that will warn her if another wall begins to crack.
In Kenya, Jane woke to the sound of shouting and bulldozers ploughing through shacks — the government’s way of forcing people to move from their homes, which were situated along a flood-prone riverbank. Still in her pyjamas, she ran to help a friend rescue what she could before the houses were demolished. She reflected: "Since we had nowhere to take our questions, we kept them to ourselves, hoping that one day we will be valued, respected and treated right."
In Mozambique, Estrela fled with her children as Cyclone Idai swept through her community. As they were running, one of her children slipped into a torrent of water. The child, weak, shaking and injured, was saved by a passer-by. As Estrela and her other children sheltered at a school, her brother carried the injured child to the local hospital, only to find it had been destroyed.
In Burkina Faso, Coulibaly stood beside her flooded field after the rain had stopped. The family's crops had disappeared beneath the water. What followed were months of worry as she wondered how they would feed their family.
The stories capture aspects of life that surveys and interviews cannot. They move beyond stating the facts of what happened to reveal how people living in vulnerable settings experience a profound event, how families and neighbours respond and what remains after physical damage has been repaired.
Instead of replacing scientific data, people's stories add depth and meaning. They help researchers gain new perspectives, ask different questions, understand challenges to recovery that numbers can't show and uncover crucial knowledge and insight that would otherwise be missed.
From stories to shared understanding
Most research projects that collect stories like these stop there. Wema did not.
A month later, the community came together again. This time, they watched one another's videos to ask a different question: What do these stories reveal when we look at them together?
Working in small groups, they wrote observations on sticky notes, grouped them by topic and debated what they meant. They challenged one another’s interpretations and worked through simple but searching questions: What keeps coming up? What surprised us? What do the stories tell us about how our emotions are affected? What are we learning about what we need to cope?
This analytical process placed the community researchers at the centre of interpreting the evidence they generated and identifying the issues they believed mattered most.
Together, they identified what communities need to better prepare for disasters, support people's mental health and recover. They discussed how the findings could help shape policy, local planning and communication so that the research could be used to improve people's lives, not just fill the pages of a scientific journal.
While the digital stories were being created, other Wema scientists were conducting large household surveys to measure the impact of extreme weather on mental health using numbers and percentages. The Wema social scientists reviewed the digital stories to find where the community and academic findings aligned, where they differed and what each perspective contributed to understanding the mental health impacts of extreme weather.
As we write, the findings are being shared at brainstorming workshops with community researchers, community engagement teams, academic researchers, health workers and government representatives. Together, they will identify priorities for future research, policy and practice.
As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of weather across Africa, research will increasingly depend on bringing different forms of knowledge together. Recognising community members as participants as well as collaborators offers a different way of doing science — one better equipped to understand complex problems and develop responses grounded in people's lived realities.
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Bhekisisa is a collaborator on the Wema project. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, it is led by the Africa Health Research Institute at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Bhekisisa, however, operates editorially independent of the project.
This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.