I have a solution to California’s, and the world’s, water woes. It’s called the RainCatcher.

In California, and throughout the Western U.S., the demand for water is rapidly outpacing supply. Current and future water needs for home and business owners, as well as for agriculture and industry, is so great that state government is desperately searching for new sources to tap, including adding six feet to the height of Shasta Dam. Massive, centralized infrastructure projects, paid for by increasing taxes and water bills, will not come close to meeting the relentless thirst of an ever expanding population. It is clear that for the next many decades, water will be the defining issue for California and the neighboring western states. What if every house in California caught and stored 10,000 gallons of water each season? That would add up to billions of gallons that wouldn’t have to be imported and purchased.

The California RainCatcher project will demonstrate how easy it is for homes; commercial and industrial buildings; municipal and public structures (office buildings, parking structures, etc) to be converted into rainwater collection centers. In this way each new and existing building can become a valuable source of water for landscaping. This would save billions of gallons each year. The water is free. Catching rain is easy. And plants love it, finding it preferable to chlorinated municipal water. Woodie Guthrie sang, “California is the Garden of Eden”. RainCatcher aims to nourish that garden by developing a new relationship with an old resource: rain. As with the installations we are doing in Africa, once a RainCatcher is in place, when the rains come no one is complaining, everyone is grateful. One at a time, as people get the concept of catching and using rainwater, the first question posed is, “I wonder why we waited so long to do this?” The wait is over, Raincatcher is here.

Where To Start

I am producing the first RainCatcher prototype for use along the coast of Northern California. My rainwater harvesting system will benefit both Californians and people in developing nations. Here’s how people in America can help their counterparts in Africa: Convert your house, garage or new building into a RainCatcher structure and 10% of the cost will go into the World RainCatcher Capital Pool. For every $1,000 spent on collecting rain here, $100 will go to setting up RainCatchers in Africa, where millions of people lack a consistent, clean source of water for drinking and irrigation. Each RainCatcher in America can help create a beneficiary RainCatcher house, school or medical clinic in Africa. This abundant resource will not only be enjoyed by millions here, but also shared with millions in developing countries. We have the capability of providing ample clean water for our own families and for others worldwide.

Manufacturers in Nairobi are making the tents and tanks needed for catching and storing rainwater for drinking and irrigation: Kentainers makes water storage tanks; Tarpo makes the RainCatcher tents.

Let it rain!

NAIROBI: It won’t be military muscle that settles a centuries-old struggle for access to the Nile. Instead, armies of engineers and financiers will slake the thirst of a war-ravaged region where generations of leaders have tended to arbitrate access to water at the point of a gun. That is the gentle vision of experts trying this week to defuse a potential source of 21st century conflict running up the spine of Africa from the Great Lakes to the Mediterranean.

Problem

Suffering deforestation, soil erosion and erratic rainfall, east African nations fiercely oppose a colonial-era pact giving effective control of the 6,741 km (4,189 mile)-long Nile and its African origins to Egyptian users far downstream. Egypt, in turn, has long challenged any initiative that would squeeze the flow of the Nile to its frontiers. In a turnaround, the governments of the 10 Nile Basin nations this week said a cooperative solution may be in sight.

Solution

Gathering with bankers and aid agencies at a conference in Nairobi, the 10 governments set aside old rivalries to explore cross-border ventures in energy and irrigation to improve collection of rainwater, most of which is currently wasted. “We accept that sustainable management and development of the Nile Basin can only be guaranteed through cooperation,” Kenyan Vice President Moody Awori told delegates. The idea is that the ventures, due to start in the next two years, will please politicians by bringing more power and irrigation to Africa’s farmers and businesses. Tapping presently unharvested rainwater, they should not hit Nile levels.

“The restructuring of cooperation across this basin has taken several years and will take several more years,” David Grey, senior water resources advisor at the World Bank said. “The imperative meanwhile is to get results on the ground, put in development projects and show benefits to poor people.” Arab Power Egypt says it is ready to provide technical and financial help to impoverished upstream countries for investment in watershed management, irrigation and water storage systems…. To date, few outside a cabal of technicians and development agencies seem aware of the inventive solutions these experts are devising for the rapidly growing region of 300 million people….

Some governments now accept they need to do a better job of informing their people about the brightening outlook for water.

Keeping Water Out Of Private Hands

Rudolf Amenga-Etego wants to make it affordable for all

By SIMON ROBINSON

Rudolf Amenga-Etego is no stranger to conflict. As a college student in the early 1980s, Amenga-Etego protested Ghana’s military rule; government officials threw him in prison and threatened to execute him. A sympathetic army captain helped him escape. These days he’s fighting global institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The subject of his protests: water.

Amenga-Etego became interested in water in 1999 when a group of his neighbors in the capital, Accra, complained that their water was cut off after rates nearly doubled and they fell behind in their payments. Backed by the World Bank and the IMF, Ghana’s government was readying its water system for privatization. “I realized that if we subjected water to market forces, we were going to price out a lot of our citizens from accessing safe water,” says Amenga-Etego, a lawyer by training who lives with his wife and three children in Medina, a mixed middle- and working-class suburb of Accra. He quit his job at Ghana’s Internal Revenue Service and challenged the water-privatization plans in the courts and on the streets. The government backed down last year and suspended privatization.

So what is Amenga-Etego’s alternative? He champions a community government model that breaks with the conventional wisdom that water systems should be run either solely by the state (often at a loss and providing poor service) or by the private sector (at a profit, providing better service but only for those who can afford it). Under Amenga-Etego’s model, the government supplies a town with bulk water, and the local community handles distribution, tariff collection and maintenance. Local management makes the system more accountable, he believes: “It’s putting power back into people’s hands. Water is life, and if people have control over their lives, they are empowered to be more productive.”

— Reported by Daneet Steffens/Accra