WUNRN
Ndaafetwa Hifekepunye stands next to her rainwater harvesting
tank. PHOTO/Servaas van den Bosch
OMUSATI
REGION,
Then she laughs and asks with a shrug, "What can you do? All children like
to play with water." But her smiles fail to hide a sense of desperation.
Here, in one of the driest places in
The Omusati region of northern
The people living here have no alternative to subsistence farming. Skills and
opportunities are scarce, so those who don't leave scrape a living herding
goats or planting crops such as millet.
In a report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),
the government predicted global warming will cause a temperature rise of
between 2 to 6 degrees Celsius in
In a country where 70 percent of the population practices some form of
agriculture, that's a frightening prospect.
Hifekepunye, who like many of her generation doesn't know her age, has 14
mouths to feed in her homestead. But at the beginning of the rainy season, her
land still lies barren, the dust so thick you can taste it in the air.
In mid-November, the rains that normally fall from October to May were already
more than a month late. All over the region, farmers tell the same story: the
growing season is getting shorter and shorter, and the rains more and more
unpredictable, putting stress on animals and people alike.
WATER CLOSE TO HOME
Even for simple things like drinking and cooking water, the women have
traditionally had to walk for hours to the nearest water point. "As a
little girl, every day my sisters and I had to walk several kilometres,
carrying heavy buckets of water for the household. The soil was so hot it would
burn the underside of our feet," Hifekepunye recalls.
She tells this story sitting in front of a large plastic rainwater-harvesting
tank. It seems incongruous in the traditional kraal, which mostly consists of
clay huts, mixed with a few brick buildings with corrugated iron roofs.
Alien as it looks, the tank has dramatically changed life in the rural
community.
"Harvesting the water right here in the village has made my life as a
woman much easier," Hifekepunye says. "I don't have to travel long
distances anymore."
As an experiment to help families adapt to ever-drier conditions, the Country
Pilot Partnership (CPP), supported by the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), distributed 70 water tanks
ranging from 2,500 to 5,000 litres to households, schools and hospitals.
Hifekepunye's homestead received the water tank for free but had to finance a cement
base and gutters linking it with the rooves out of their own pocket.
She thinks it's a fair deal. "The advantage is significant, especially
during the rainy season when the authorities close the tap at the water supply
point two kilometres away as a cost-saving measure. Because of this tank, we
have clean drinking water right here," she says.
No such luck for 16-year-old Maria Eelu from the Omulai settlement. This
morning she has travelled several kilometres to the Calueque canal to fetch
water.
She filled 19 25-litre drums with water. Now she is supervising a group of
small children as they lift the drums onto a donkey cart, careful not to spill
a drop. "This is about a two-day supply for several households,"
Maria explains. "Our village is three kilometres away and doesn't have
running water." The donkeys patiently gaze into the mud at their feet
waiting for the slow journey home.
DRIP IRRIGATION
The Calueque canal, which diverts water from the Calueque dam in nearby
For farmers, Calueque is of major importance. They use it covertly to irrigate
their crops when there is not enough rain, even though they have been banned
from doing so by
Paulus Amutenya is one of the farmers that taps into the canal and a nearby
lake, also fed from
"Without rainfall we have to irrigate more," he says. "With the
drip lines the project gave us we can efficiently distribute the scarce water
when and where we need it."
The adaptation measures the CPP has helped put in place are hardly high-tech or
unique, concedes programme manager Andreas Shilomboleni, but they work and they
are cheap.
"Through the climate change adaptation programme we have introduced simple
and cheap methods such as irrigation lines, water pumps, drought-resistant
livestock and plant breeds, or basic water harvesting technology," he
says.
A few kilometres down the road, deep in the Mopane woodlands of the border
area, Shilomboleni lifts a water pump from the back of his Landcruiser.
Immanuel Hambiya's face breaks into a smile.
"We need the pump to bring water from the nearby lake," says the
subsistence farmer who grows green peppers, cabbage, sweetcorn and many other
fruits and vegetables on his 2.5 hectare plot.
"These years the rains come late and are not enough," explains
Hambiya. "So the water level in the lake drops and we have to pump it from
further and further, or migrate to where the water is, or simply plant less
crops."
Before he had a pump and drip lines, Hambiya also relied on traditional flood
furrow irrigation, one of the oldest techniques. "It's a method that is hard
to control," he explains. "If there is a lot of water at once, the
crops will drown and become vulnerable to pests and fungi. It was also a very
wasteful and laborious way of watering the plants. With the drip lines we are
much more efficient."
Hambiya says that, after introducing the water-saving irrigation method, he has
seen his yield increase by 10 percent, while using much less of the valuable
water.
As water becomes an even scarcer commodity in arid