However, the technology faces a cloudy future because the equipment is often a challenge to keep maintained
ILMASIN, Kenya (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — With a thirsty and impatient boy waiting nearby, Joseph Kipalian draws water from a tank and pours it into the boy’s bucket.
The schoolyard water tank is fed from an unusual source: the air.
Ilmasin primary school, in the Ngong hills south of Nairobi, is outfitted with fog collectors. These contraptions of huge metal and wooden poles hold mesh-patterned nets that trap fog droplets, which trickle into holding tanks.
The project, set up by the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, aims to test the viability of harvesting fog to help provide a safe and reliable source of water in water-scarce areas.
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Bancy Mati, a soil and water engineering professor at the university, said fog collection is one of the cheapest and most environmentally friendly ways of collecting clean water.
She launched the Kenya collector after a similar project, set up by a German nongovernmental organization, ran successfully in Tanzania. She said the region around the Ngong hills is a great place to collect water because it sees fog both in the early morning and throughout the night.
The region is semi-arid and has perpetual problems with water shortages, she added.
Fog collectors, if built at scale, could help unlock the economic potential of dry but fertile areas such as Ilmasin by providing water for irrigation and livestock as well as for families, Mati said.
She hopes the collectors could be used across the country, particularly Marsabit County in northern Kenya, another semi-arid region with plenty of fog.
However, while the technology has been used successfully around the world from Chile to Yemen, keeping the fog-catching arrays operating in the long-term has proved challenging.
The collectors in Ilmasin were installed in 2014, and for a time they produced 60 litres of clean water a day, which is half what the school’s 340 students need.
However, high winds destroyed part of the system last year, and wear and tear on the nets and poles is also taking a toll. Production is now just 20 to 30 litres of water a day, said Kipalian, who operates the system.
That has led to water rationing, and Kipalian said he worries that women and girls will once again have to travel long distances in search of clean drinking water or spend money they don’t have buying water.
He said that when the fog collector was in full operation, school girls had more time for studies because they were spared the task of walking to collect water.
Water was often available for livestock as well.
However, Mati said she has yet to find continuing funding to sustain the fog collection system because nets, which are imported from Chile, and iron poles are expensive to replace, and timber poles have not proved durable enough.
She hopes the government might exempt the nets from import taxes to lower their price and make them more widely accessible. She is also looking into whether nets can be manufactured locally with an ultimate aim of installing one fog collection system per home in Ilmasin.
John Simel, the Ilmasin school’s headmaster, said he feared the school might face health issues if the system fails and the school has too little clean drinking water. The area at times receives little or no rain over a six month period.
He said the fog collectors have also helped the children better understand environmental issues and the importance of natural resources to local lives and jobs.
