Water storage system helps Kenyans thrive in drought conditions

Even after the heavy rains that drenched East Africa in April, Makueni County in eastern Kenya remains dry - and it's not clear when increasingly elusive rainfall will come again.

But the women of Kikumbulyu village are not worried. Last November, they built a rock catchment system to harvest rainwater. Now, despite dry weather, the village still has plenty of water.

"Apart from the gift of life from God, this is the other biggest blessing that has come to us," said villager Mary Mwikali Kiminza, a mother of five and a member of the village's Ithine Self Help Group.

"My feet are now rested without endless trips to (fetch water), and my children can now concentrate in school because I no longer ask them to follow me to the river," she said.

Kibwezi sub-county, where Kikumbulyu village is located, is hilly with huge rocks - not the kind of environment that supports traditional methods of water conservation such as water pans or "sand dams", which use wet sand to hold water.

Building resilience

But since 2010, the Africa Sand Dam Foundation, a Kenyan nongovernmental organization, has worked with villagers in the Makueni area to build rock catchment systems, taking advantage of the local geography to make themselves more water secure.

Rock catchment systems use naturally occurring rock outcrops to divert rainwater to a central collection area. A concrete wall is built to direct the water that trickles down the rock surface into a sand and gravel filter, then down pipes into covered storage tanks.

"The main idea is to build resilience to climate extremes among the worst-hit areas, using locally acceptable techniques and making them as sustainable as possible," Matheka Cornelius Kyalo, ASDF's executive director, told Reuters.

According to data from the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization, annual rainfall in Makueni County ranges between 150 mm during a dry spell and 650 mm in years of heavy rainfall.

But, even in a good year, Makueni is thirsty compared with regions in western Kenya such as Kitale, which receives an average of 1,260 mm of rainfall annually.

Local materials

The ASDF project aims to help villagers work together to adapt to the area's increasingly dry climate. So far, the organization has built 10 rock catchment units in as many Makueni villages, feeding rainfall runoff from the rocks to a total of 26 concrete tanks. Each tank can hold up to 190,000 liters of water.

To construct a catchment as part of the project, residents must form a community group and provide the labor as well as locally available materials, such as sand and pebbles.

The foundation then provides other needed building materials, such as cement and pipes, and experts to help guide the construction.

A rock catchment unit with two tanks costs 2.5 million Kenyan shillings ($25,000) to build, with the money raised from donor organizations including Kenyan banks.

The project also generates an income for the community groups who build the systems.

The groups sell 20 liters of water for 10 Kenyan shillings (10 cents), even to their own members.