Project in Kenyan village provides water for livestock and households, allowing children to stay in school
LEMISHAMI, Kenya (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — It’s a busy market day in the Kenyan village of Lemishami, and Letilia Lekula herds his goats to a dry, sandy riverbed with a stone wall built across it.
The animals wait patiently as he pulls a wooden trough from a nearby thicket and then starts digging in the sand.
After about five minutes, Lekula hears a splash. The sound is now so familiar to his goats that they circle around him as he scoops water from the hole in the sand into a trough for them to drink.
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For the pastoralists of Lemishami in Ol Donyiro ward, which lies 115 kilometres from the town of Isiolo in Kenya’s arid eastern region, the sand dam is a lifesaver.
Built across the Raap River, the simple wall catches water and silt that flows down from a nearby mountain range. As sand accumulates at the wall, it traps water and holds it through much of the dry season.
Months after natural ponds and rivers have dried up, the sand dam remains a reliable source of water.
Only a few years ago, villagers could rely on the year-round flow of the Ewaso Ng’iro River. However, the river has now all but disappeared between March and August as upriver communities use more water for farming. The area’s rainfall is too sporadic to keep the river topped up.
“It’s been dry for the better part of the year,” Lekula said. “The rain is unpredictable. Nowadays, it’s both very heavy and only lasts a few days.”
Lekula’s village received the sand dam as part of the Isiolo County Adaptation Fund (ICAF), a three-year-old project funded by the British international development department through the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development.
The fund worked with communities in Ol Donyiro, which is classified as a water-stressed region, to understand the challenges they face.
The communities proposed sand dams as a solution to their water shortage problems, and the fund constructed and rehabilitated a dozen sand dams across the parched county at a cost of $50,000.
The sand dam in Lemishami is so effective that the pastoralists no longer feel the need to move their households, or manyattas, every year in search of water. Children can stay in school and women don’t have to walk 30 kilometres to find water for their families.
The sand dam doesn’t provide enough water for all of the community’s cows, which have been moved to more remote grazing fields, but the villagers can keep a few goats at home for milk and meat.
“Now the manyattas and schools are settled,” said Lekula. “We have enough water for our households, school and goats and have enough time after watering our animals to buy food from the market.”
Ol Donyiro has no substantial groundwater and receives only 300 to 350 millimetres of rain a year, said Junius Njeru, an engineer with the water ministry in Isiolo County.
However, the ward also has some fortunate geography because it is the endpoint for flood water coming from the rainy Nyandarua Mountains. Every time it rains on the mountains, the overflow brings water and silt down to the area’s dry riverbeds.
Njeru said the flood water would normally disappear quickly once it reached Ol Donyiro, but now the sand dams that sit across some of the area’s riverbeds catch the water during the rainy season and hold onto it through the dry season.
The 1.5 metre high and one metre wide Lemishami sand dam holds 50,000 cubic metres of water, which experts say should sustain five villages for three months.
“Storing water together with the sand reduces the rate of the evaporation, enabling the water to last longer than it would have in an open area,” Njeru said.
The sand also helps clean the water when it reaches the dam.
“Sand acts like activated carbon in a normal water supply,” Njeru said. “The water comes down as muddy, but it’s filtered as it passes through the sand.”
Lekula is grateful that the sand dam has brought reliable water to his community, its livestock and the area’s wildlife. However, he remembers struggling to find water and fears that even the sand dam will run dry if it does not rain soon.
Njeru said the pastoralist shouldn’t worry because the dam relies on rain from the wet mountains rather than the dry area around Lemishami village.
“As long as the rainwater is flowing into the rivers from upstream, the sand dams will always have water,” he said.
