Kola Sand Dams

Last weekend, we took an overnight trip about 2 hours southeast of Nairobi to a little town called Kola. It was the home of a very successful organization that worked with local *self-help groups to build sand dams and plant trees and various other community development projects.  This organization is partially funded by MCC and there is a couple in their 70s who are MCC service workers who are workers in this organization. This program is about 30 years old and claims to have built almost 1500 sand dams to date. Each sand dam is claimed to benefit 1500 people. This place does their homework and it is a pretty amazing thing to see.  We got to hike around to about 6 or 7 sand dams in various stages of maturity. A new sand dam often still has water. A mature sand dam is completely filled in with sand and is therefore a mature reservoir that holds a large amount of water, keeping it from evaporation and making it available just by digging a hole into the sand.
*a Self-help group is a group of people in a community who have an agreement to work together and are officially registered with the government. Everyone has a role in the group and they share tasks- rotating around the properties of each member, helping to get farming tasks, terrace building, tree planting, etc done. Sometimes they farm in a cooperative and put the money back into the group projects.  With regard to sand dams, there is a lot of work to get a sand dam done, but these self-help groups are the catalysts for a project that benefits an entire community. There is a rule that no-one is denied water from the dams. Often the whole community arrives to help the self-help group because they understand the benefit for everyone.

We saw a lot of self-help group members out in their gardens. Some were a little closer to the dam than the directors would have preferred, but they were obviously gaining a lot from the water source.

Here you can see the dry river bed and the sand dam (made of cement on a rock base).  Behind the dam you can see all the green that has grown up. These sand dams bring up the water table effecting the whole area.  They mark the coordinates and watch on google earth to see the effects of these dams with regard to green areas.

The guy who was growing these mangos claimed that the production on this tree doubled from 500-1000 pieces just from building the sand dam in proximity. Its really quite an amazing concept.   It is bringing water back to entire regions.

More farming- here they are growing kale- for "sukuma wiki"- a staple dish of the Kenyan diet.

This is a mature sand dam. The sand has built up for 2 km up-stream, all the silt has continued on down the river.  Stored in the sand is a reservoir. Because it brings the water table up, its more like an aquifer of sand filtered clean drinking water.

Doug examines some yummy looking mangos. These are a great cash crop around here.

One of the partners we will be working with during our time with MCC has received funding for two sand dams. This organization in Kola will be mentoring/teaching the other organization how to go about building sand dams.