WATCH CENTRAL KALAHARI Rain HARVESTERS IN OPERATION!

Over the past two weeks we successfully implemented phase 1 of our endeavour to provide Botswana's remotest communities - the hunter-gatherer San and Bakgalagadi of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve - with access to their own Portable Rainwater Harvesters (PRHs).  The four installed phase 1 PRH devices are now accessible to 60% of the resident CKGR population (three out of the five villages)  Under the long-term average annual rainfall conditions, these four devices can collectively harvest around 8400 litres per year,  providing much-needed supplementation to water supplies trucked in each month by the District Councils. 

Potable (non-saline) fossil ground water supplies in the CKGR are notoriously unreliable, expensive to develop, and difficult to maintain.  It is also extremely expensive to transport water in each month to these villages by truck - the most remote of the communities being 140km, by sandy 4X4 track, from the nearest developed settlement!

Watch the video's below (8th April 2019), showing some of the community members extract water from a 2,500 litre capacity PRH device set up at Mothomelo:   Over 200 litres were extracted after a single brief rainshower, which fell whilst we were still setting it up earlier the same day.    

In phase 2 - planned for later this year - another installed 23 units will have the capability of meeting the drinking needs of the entire CKGR human population (est. at 306), without having to rely on any other artificial supplies.  Funding support for phase 2 is still needed!

Thanks to Mike McCune and Karen Kaye Smith-McCune of San Francisco, for their donation towards the PRH initiative and for helping to make this important exercise possible!