Sand dam, an oasis of hope for Kibwezi residents

By Elisha Kamau

Elizabeth Ndong'wa, a 42 aged lady walks into her farm with a sack under the scorching sun.

She is all smiles as she instructs fellow women on which side to start from as they dig into her four-acre piece of land. It’s harvesting time.

Elizabeth is one of the 5000 local beneficiaries of the Sand Dam Water project in    Kibwezi County.

“To overcome the drought challenges at Kibwezi, we organized ourselves into a     coherent team, comprising of 15 men and 25 women and worked towards constructing a sand dam in the area,” she adds.

“With support from Africa Sand Dam Foundation (ASDF) and Kenya Commercial   Bank (KCB), we built a sand dam to provide us with water that we very much needed for our domestic and socio-economic use,” she says.

Before the construction of the dam and due to the arid nature of the locality, we faced daily challenges relating to a lack of food and a scarcity of water, and trekked several kilometers in search of the precious commodity.

"People had to walk 5km every Monday to go to the nearby market to buy vegetables to last the whole week," she adds.

During the rainy season, water collects behind the dam, and brings with it tonnes of sand and silt. Over the course of around three such wet periods, the   sand builds up behind the dam and collates water with it.

With a cheerful smile she notes that this season she has had a bumper harvest of maize, kales commonly known as ‘sukuma wiki’, tomatoes and pepper.

Before the dam was constructed, Elizabeth and her team used to farm once a year and this was during the rainy season. From my interview with her, she notes that the last time she had such a bumper harvest was during the last El-nino rains.

In her piece of land she uses a generator to pump water to irrigate her crops.

This is one of the notable projects that the Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) has kicked off in a bid to improve the standards of living especially for the marginalized communities.

“Ensuring access to water in the arid and semi-arid areas is key in boosting business opportunities, food security and in turn alleviating poverty,” notes KCB’s Foundation Manager, Ms. Rachael Gathoni.

“We need to empower our people and help them raise their living standards,” she says adding that the foundation is investing in sustainable cost effective methods of harvesting water in order to improve access.

For Elizabeth, it’s now a different story all together; the dam has changed her life   completely. She now makes 30,000 for tomatoes, 5000-sukuma wiki, 3000 for spinach and 5000 for maize.

This season she will plant a lot more to increase her crop yield.

According to the Director at Africa Sand Dam Foundation, he notes that Sand Dams have seen the communities break the cycle of dependence on relief food and are now practicing sustainable farming, which has increased agricultural productivity in the county. 

The women in the communities who are the biggest beneficiaries from the dams now have hope for a better future for their families and Kibwezi constituency as a whole.

About Africa Sand Dam Foundation

Africa Sand Dam Foundation (ASDF) is the strategic partner of Excellent Development. They work closely with marginalized rural communities in southeast Kenya to   increase access to clean water, health, food production and incomes.