A community living on the fringes of Kenya's Rift Valley have built a weir at the nearby Ngeng' river to capture and store water which would otherwise drain away during periods of heavy rainfall.

 

The weir, a concrete barrier that stretches across the river, allows water to pool behind it while excess spills over the top and continues downstream. Pipes installed in the pool behind the weir tap the water and carry it underground to a storage tank.

 

Women used to spend most of the day searching for water from far-away sources. Even the little they found was not clean because of sharing with wild animals. Now they can fetch water for cooking and washing from a tank in the village, and there is no longer a need to herd livestock to the river for a drink. The village’s dispensary and primary school also benefit from having clean water supplies nearby.

 

The project aims to ease a range of problems facing communities like Engilae, which are suffering increasingly extreme weather swings linked to climate change.

 

Like many arid parts of Kenya, the terrain around Engilae is dotted with empty river courses during the dry season, when the daytime temperature can rise as high as 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit).

 

The Ngeng' river is one of the few that flows for most of the year. But during prolonged droughts, even it has little water.

 

Floods also bring to a temporary halt basic local services, such as healthcare and relief food supplies, and make clean water hard to find, not least because they damage water harvesting facilities, local administrators say.

 

The new weir, set up in close association with the Engilae community, aims to address all those problems. The idea is to tap the little water that flows through the river course but also prepare to harvest bigger volumes from the seasonal floods. The system can collect more than 20,000 liters (5,300 gallons) of water each day, and uses solar energy to pump water to the storage tank.

 

 

PHOTO: Schoolgirls in the Kenyan village of Engilae wash their lunch dishes at the community's water-capturing weir, as engineers install a solar plant in the background.

CREDIT: THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION/Kagondu Njagi.