Solar-pumped water slakes rural Kenya’s thirst for development
Access to clean water remains a struggle for much of rural Kenya, and its abundance of sunshine went untapped for years
Marimanti — Stooped over knee-high rows of green gram plants [chickpeas] at her farm in eastern Kenya, Grace Kaari hums to herself as she slices out weeds with a blunt machete. Two years ago, Kaari would not have had time to tend her crop in the morning. Instead, she would have been travelling to gather water, at a river 12km away. “I used to spend the whole day fetching water. I could not do anything else for the day because of tiredness,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. However, a recently installed solar-powered water pump has now brought the precious resource direct to her village. And with the village water storage tanks full, she has time for the endless other tasks on her one-acre piece of land, she said. Access to clean water remains a struggle for many of rural Kenya’s poorest households, with families blaming the problem on everything from a lack of infrastructure to a lack of government commitment to help the country's most marginalised. But some counties, such a...
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