Over 6,000 farmers in the semi-arid Yatta Constituency have used water pans to carry their staple crops to full maturity during the renewed drought and grow additional, high-earning vegetables to export.
Water pans or earth dams collect and store rain and drainage water. Farmers dig them into the ground using jembes or machines to provide water when rains are not available.
“The maize, beans, and arrowroots we’d planted in November as well as the fruit orchard on our farm in Ikombe Ward had begun wilting because the rain had stopped for over two weeks. Unlike before when we would just watch as the legendary Kamba heat scorched our entire crop away, we pumped water in drip lines using solar from one of our seven four million liter water pans. This will give our crops the push they need to be ready for harvest at the end of the month,” said Bishop Titus Masika. The founder and director of Yatta Christian Impact Mission (CIM) which has spearheaded the construction of over 8,000 water pans in Yatta.
According to the bishop, the biggest problem farmers in arid and semi-arid areas such as Yatta face is “not that it does not rain, but, rather, that the water farmers get is often not available for long enough to carry their crops to maturity.” Kenyan agriculture does not necessarily need more rain, but brains to figure out how the rain we receive is captured and preserved for later use, he said.
Around 98 per cent of Kenya’s agriculture is rainfed. However, only 16 per cent of Kenya receives rain for long enough for it to sustain crop production.
The water pan construction project began in 2009 after Bishop Masika saw firsthand the devastation wrought by the prolonged 2008 drought that left more than 10 million people at risk of hunger after the country’s crop harvests failed.
Related News: Vegetable farmers use water harvesting to sell produce at peak prices
Related News: Pans helps farmers harvest water for use all-year round
“People in Yatta had no food after their crops died and were entirely dependent on food aid,” the bishop said.
His first course of action was to gather farmers from his home ward of Ikombe into 100 groups of 10 who dug 1,300 household farm ponds and water pans trough merry-go-rounds.
Citing Moses using a walking stick to produce water from a rock, and part the Red Sea, the bishop said he wanted farmers to use their hands to help themselves and not be dependent on aid organisations or the government to improve their lives.
In 2010, he scaled the number of groups up to 4,000. The following year with the help of the National Irrigation Authority(NIA), his initiative used excavators to double the number of water pans to over 8,000.
“The money farmers got from selling export crops such as bullet chilies and French Beans and high-value crops like tomatoes, onions, and watermelons that we grow in the offseason, like January to March, after harvesting the maize and beans staple crops and when their prices are the highest, were used in farmer wealth creation part of which went to pay the Sh8,000-9,000 per hour dam excavation cost,” Titus said.
This helped to expand existing dams and dig up new ones.
Today, vegetables that come from over 400Km away in Nyandarua can be bought from a neighbour and are sold to neighbouring constituencies and counties that do not grow them at premium prices.
The bishop added that most areas of Africa even if they are food insecure have a source of water. “Like the garden of Eden, the first farm in history, which didn’t depend on rain but according to Genesis 2:10, was watered by a river, Yatta has Athi river and Tana at the extreme end, two permanent rivers that stretch across the entire constituency. We have more than enough water all around us that is just not tapped properly.
Kenya’s ASAL regions have a groundwater potential of 1,740 million cubic meters annually. However, Kenya only uses 17 percent of this groundwater. Meanwhile, farmers remain dependant on increassinly erratic rainfall patterns and rainfall failure.
Related News: Low-cost water harvesting techniques
Related News: How to get rainwater harvesting services from Kenya Rainwater Association
“Turkana is dry, but has 2.5 million hectares of arable land with the potential for the large-scale production of high-value crops with irrigation. Egypt meanwhile has three million hectares of arable land, but has utilised every inch of it to become self-sufficient and even export food. The difference isn’t rain but brain,” Bishop Titus pointed out.
In Ikombe, he is creating a small Eypt and has weaned the Ward’s farmers from being dependent on relief food aid even in times of drought.
His project provided the blueprint for the government’s own roadmap for the construction of small dams and water pans. Benchmarking and training as and is being done in Yatta to replicate the project in other parts of Kenya, in Tanzania with World Vision, in dry parts of Uganda such as Karamoja, as well as Ethiopia.