Our school is in a dry area of this country, and it
regularly runs out of water due to continuing drought conditions. The school serves almost 800 students,
including 470 boarding students, plus teachers and staff, and it needs a
continuous supply of water to maintain a clean and healthy learning
environment. The drought poses many
problems at the school, including threatening the health and welfare of its
students, and impeding their education through imposing a financial burden on
the school. When the school has no
water, cooking, cleaning, and bathing is a challenge. The students often must spend their time and
money making unsupervised treks off the school compound to fill their buckets
with water purchased from other sources.
Unsupervised expeditions by students away from school are normally
carefully monitored by teachers, except for this mass exit of students away
from school in search of water. These
off-campus trips put the students at risk of making contacts that lead to HIV
infection, pregnancy, and other undesirable outcomes.
At the request of our headmistress, we formed a committee
which decided to build two rainwater harvesting systems. We located one system near the school's
kitchen (it takes a lot of water to cook beans and rice) and the other adjacent
to the girls' dormitories. We applied
for and received U.S. government grants to partially finance the project and
the school raised matching funds.
Construction started immediately after the funds were received, to take
advantage of the rapidly approaching rainy season.
The systems consist
of gutters installed on dormitory and classroom buildings, which direct
rainwater via pipes into four 5000 liter water tanks. The tanks are elevated on sturdy cement-block
stands, and connected to a spigot for access. One of the tanks is piped directly to the
kitchen and the other three are available for student use. We found that a rainfall of between 1 and 2
centimeters on the roofs will fill the tanks to the top, and supply the school
with 20,000 liters of clean water. The
system is low-maintenance, and virtually costless. The students now have free, safe access to clean
water on campus. 