Solar-pumped water slakes rural Kenya's thirst for development

Marimanti

Stooped over knee-high rows of green gram plants at her farm in eastern Kenya, Grace Kaari hums to herself as she slices out weeds with a blunt machete.

Two years ago, Kaari would not have had time to tend her crop in the morning. Instead, she would have been travelling to gather water, at a river 12 kilometres (7 miles) away.

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“I used to spend the whole day fetching water. I could not do anything else for the day because of tiredness,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

But a recently installed solar-powered water pump has now brought the precious resource direct to her village. And with the village water storage tanks full, she has time for the endless other tasks on her one-acre piece of land, she said.

Access to clean water remains a struggle for many of rural Kenya’s poorest households, with families blaming the problem on everything from a lack of infrastructure to a lack of government commitment to help the country’s most marginalised.

But some counties, such as Kaari’s Tharaka Nithi – where rural electrification is widely lacking – now are tapping solar energy to pump water to villages from nearby rivers.

The water is then directed into village storage tanks where household members can fetch it free of charge.

Read more on the site BusinessDailyAfrica.com