By Don Cayo | The Vancouver Sun

The theory is simple: If you provide easier access to water, the scarce and essential resource that demands so much of women’s time in a dry country like Ethiopia, you loosen the bonds of drudgery that hold them down.

It doesn’t always work out quite that simply, or that quickly, as is made plainin a two-page Vancouver Sun story by Joshua Hergesheimer. He looks unblinkingly at the challenge that remains — affecting meaningful social change, despite a Canadian NGO’s great success in bringing clean, accessible water to villages whose women’s lives have been defined by the need to fetch and carry, and whose children have often died from water-borne disease.

Hergesheimer’s story, accessible here and well worth the read, interests me for another reason, too. He traveled to Ethiopia and wrote the story on a scholarship grant available to students of the Langara College journalism program in Vancouver.

Aside from its principle funder, the Canadian International Development Agency, this grant program has nothing to do with the Seeing the World Through New Eyes fellowship program for young working journalists that I help to run. But it does share a common goal — exposing young Canadian writers to the gripping issues of mass poverty around the world, and bringing home compelling stories for Canadian readers.

At a time when newsroom resources in Canada are stretched thin and travel budgets have shrivelled, I think this kind of program takes on even more importance than in past. So I’m delighted to see Langara take on the challenge of providing this kind of opportunity to its students, and delighted that Hergesheimer was able to use it so well.

To link to some posts and columns on the Jack Webster Foundation fellowship I work with and our pending trip to Africa, and to some of the stories done by the young working journalists on our last trip to Latin America, click here.