Photo by: Abdikadir Aden
Water is life and every running life is in need of it. It is one of the most important elements and no creature can survive without it. What happens when there is no single drop of water? This small world seems to come to an end. But as humans we appreciate little the natural free water that we get.
Being over dependent on the water supplied by the local institutions, is not enough for water security. We have changed most of our lifestyles to living in urban centres. This has contributed to the diminishing of traditional lifestyle in which community members in the villages harnessed waster.
Look at most parts of the world where violence is reported daily. People are killing one another due to natural resources. And in pastoralists setups, they are also fighting for watering points for their livestock.
As human beings, most of us cannot save and conserve water and its sources because we think it is fully available. Such an attitude has made us witness drying water bodies with our day to day activities that end up polluting these water sources and in the long run it is becoming a history.
When we sense a drop of rain water on our body, we take immediate shelter. No one is bothered to put a basin outside our houses so that water is managed. After an hour or so, we complain that there is water all over and its muddy.
In the Northern region of Kenya, this is a rainy season of the year. We have experience rains and much more is anticipated. Still, a lot of water is left to go to waste. Most of the roads within the residential zones are flooded. Because rain water was ignored, there are floods everywhere.
The clean rain water that I saw a few days ago has turned out to be greenish in colour. It has become a breeding zone for mosquitoes, and the number of malaria patients are increasing with every passing hour. Just as much is campaigned for towards food security, we tend to forget that it is water that makes us be able to produce the food we are talking about.
Such water could be harnessed and saved for a better use. From domestic usage to irrigating farms, community members need to highlight the importance of water conservation. There is a need to inculcate into the minds of that villager who has no idea of what a water gutter is.
Rainwater harvesting is the process of augmenting the natural filtration of rainwater in to the underground formation by some artificial methods.
In our residential home setups, roof-top rainwater harvesting is the most recommended. This is a system of catching rainwater where it falls on the roof. The roof becomes the catchments, and the rainwater is collected from the roof of the house/building. It can either be stored in a tank or diverted to an artificial recharge system. This method is less expensive, very effective and if implemented properly, helps in augmenting the ground water level of the area.
Such water can be used for domestic purposes, agriculture, and can even be used by our young and upcoming environmentalists for their tree nurseries.
Save water, Save a Life.
By Abdikadir Aden
Guest Blogger, Kenya
