People in the United States drink over 2.5 billion gallons of bottled water each year, an amount equal to a single days’ rainfall on the side of one mountain in Hawaii.

The resource and the need exist side by side. The RainCatcher is a small mountain placed in the path of the coming rainy season. Instead of one big mountain, the idea is to scatter thousands and thousands of little ones over an entire continent. All these small efforts add up to the same result: billions of gallons of life-giving water.

Like the yurt, like the circus tent, the RainCatcher is set up in a day by the people who will be harvesting the water. The cost is minimal. Materials needed: some rope, tarps and tent poles, and as many plastic water tanks as can be rounded up. For a while, more rain will fall than we will be able to catch, but our goal is to catch enough in each region so that everyone can enjoy, year round, the simple pleasure of a clean glass of 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