Bringing Water to Kasaani

Bringing Water to Kasaani

Category: Community Conservation, Ex-poachers, Human-Wildlife Conflict, Tsavo West Sustainable Development Programme | Date: Sep 09 2009 | By: gvikenya

It was back in early 2007 that GVI first met and began to work with the community of Kasaani village… in many ways your ’stereotypical’ rural dusty Kenyan community trying to scrape a living from the land.

The Tsavo landscape around Kasaani village

In their case the land lies on the very edge of Tsavo West National Park. The landscape is stunning with views of Chyulu Hills and Taita Hills dotting the Kenyan plains to the North and East, the impressive North Pare Mountains of Tanzania to the South and, when the clouds clear, the majestic Mt Kilimanjaro to the West.

Collecting water from the neighbouring village of Cess

However it makes for tough living, the rains so unpredictable that their efforts at subsistence farming are more like a lottery than a livelihood. It’s not just the crops that suffer from lack of water; the community of Kasaani have never had a water source in their village and normal daily life requires the men, women and children to make a 5km round trip to their nearest source. Those lucky enough to have a bicycle can fetch 60l at a time, on foot you have to triple the number of journeys. Beatrice highlighted just one example of how they are forced to economise on water when she pointed to a group of children and told me how they don’t wash their children’s clothes when they need to because they just can’t spare the water.

Some of the curious children at Kasaani

Poor access to potable water is cited as one of the key objectives of the millennium development goals. So getting water to this community that we have been working with to promote sustainable alternative livelihoods in place of poaching and the bush meat trade has become a priority… with volunteer manpower and some funding sourced, we set ourselves the challenge - 3.5km of trenches to be dug to run a water pipeline from the borehole at Salita village.

We teamed up with Taveta District Council’s Constituency Development Fund to co-finance the project and bring the expertise, and we, our volunteers and the ex-poachers of Kasaani teamed up for two weeks of digging.

At the outset it seemed a huge task for our team armed only with pangas, hoes and spades but when on the first day we took the 5km round trip with a 20l container to get our own water the value of the project struck home and the seeds of determination were sown.