UN urges rainwater harvesting to aid Africa

NAIROBI, Nov 14 (Reuters) Harvesting rainfall in Africa is an underused and cheap way to combat drought in the world's poorest continent, the U N Environment Programme said.

Pipes from rooftops and mini-reservoirs can catch rains in systems costing 30-70 dollars for every cubic metre of water storage capacity, it said. Saving rains can also save millions of people hours a day spent fetching water.

''Rainwater harvesting ... is a way to help communities who are on the front line of drought, of seasonable availability of rainfall, to act,'' UNEP head Achim Steiner yesterday told a news conference on the sidelines of the U N climate talks in Kenya.

''It does not require billions of dollars of investment,'' he said, comparing it to the costs of dams or systems for piping drinking water to homes.

The report, by UNEP and the World Agroforestry Center, estimated that Kenya's 35 million people had enough rains to supply six or seven times its current population.

Ethiopia, where almost half the 79 million population suffer hunger, had a potential rainwater harvest to supply 520 million people, it said.

Steiner said it would be impossible to harvest all rains but ''the numbers do underline the huge untapped potential,'' he said, adding that rainwater harvesting needed more research for use around the world in both rich and poor nations.

''Rainwater harvesting has helped us very much,'' said Agnes Mosoni Loirket, a Maasai community leader in Kisamese in central Kenya whose village has set up a 500 cubic metre storage system.

She said the project saved women and children from having to walk five km daily to fetch water from a polluted source. ''Now our children wake up in the morning and go to school,'' she said.

Loirket said she had a small kitchen garden growing vegetables, including spinach and onions, that she previously had to buy in shops. Other women, freed from carrying water, could also work on everything from farming to handicrafts.

UNEP said 14 of Africa's 53 countries were classified as water stressed or water scarce. The number could double by 2025, partly because of global warming widely blamed on rising emissions of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.

''In the popular mind, Africa is seen as a dry continent,'' said Dennis Garrity, head of the World Agroforestry Center. ''But overall, it actually has more water resources per capita than Europe.'' ''Some countries are already successfully exploiting their rainwater. In south Australia, over 40 per cent of households use rainwater stored in tanks as their main source of drinking water,'' he said. ''Germany has over half a million rainwater harvesting schemes.'' Reuters BDP DB0925