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News from Kenya frequently entails a mention of communal violence and this violence is often attributed to longstanding conflicts over water, pastures and livestock.
Communities in the arid north rift valley and northern parts of Kenya engage in bloody clashes that result in loss of lives and displaces entire communities with the elderly, women, children and the disabled being the worst affected.
What stands at the centre of this scenic but turbulent African country is the struggle for water that makes its presence felt in almost every sphere of social engagement.
While large-scale cattle thefts between rival communities is a major driver, access to water sources for livestock followed by ownership of grazing fields are the auxiliary causes of the age-old conflict that bedevils the scenic hills of Kenya’s Elgeyo-Marakwet county.
Unknown to many, there is a inspiring story of ingenuity of a centuries-old innovation that is known as the Marakwet Escarpment Furrow Irrigation System. The system is a masterpiece in conserving and managing water for irrigation and beyond.
So old is this irrigation marvel that it is believed to be more than 500-years-old, a testimony to the role of rarely appreciated indigenous wisdom of harvesting water.
Located on the Marakwet escarpment at an elevation of about 1,500 metres above the floor of the Kerio valley, the furrows could easily be mistaken for galleys dug out by rainwater runoff.
However, the old engineering technique running across the scenic ridges that form the escarpment has, for centuries, ensured that this semi-arid region is immune to food insecurity — a rare feat in this part of Kenya.
Over the years, the system has capitalised on rivers flowing into the area from the distant Cherangany hills, utilising gravity for the flow of water to the irrigation furrows in the plains below.
The entire system spreads along a breadth of more than 40 kilometres, allowing residents to grow a variety of vegetables, paw paws, mangoes, bananas, sorghum and millets.
“This is besides water for domestic use and for livestock, a treasured source of both wealth and prestige among the Marakwet people, a community that practises mixed subsistence farming,” Wesley Kipchumba, a farmer and community member in Tot area said.
“These furrows have ensured that this area is always green and farmers have some food for their families even in the driest years unlike other places in this region,” the 64-year old boasted.
The traditional water system, besides being a lifeline, has become a source of pride for the local communities, who share the canals along clan lines, with each clan contributing money and labour to carry out maintenance works.
Kipchumba meanwhile regrets that he cannot recall the last time the villages received government support for the maintenance of the irrigation system.
It is recognition of this ingenuity that the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), in 2023 , designated the furrows a tentative world heritage site, one of the few in the world and perhaps the only in Africa.
“The technology of furrow construction is complex; it involves the use of trunks, wood and stones laid on top of each other and with the support of mortar and leaves. From their sources, furrows follow weak or lower points passing through hills and valleys,” UNESCO mentioned in its notes on the ancient irrigation system.
“Due to scarcity of water, the inhabitants of the area have, over the years, developed land use systems based on their perception and knowledge of the fragile ecological base. To reconcile the competing demands for water use, the Marakwet evolved a unique technique of managing water rights that took into consideration the needs of each clan,” the UN agency further states.
It is important to highlight that this water management system operates on ‘non-bureaucratic principles’ which ensures that the furrows provide water for both human and animal consumption as well as for irrigation.
The local communities have developed sophisticated techniques for managing water flows, maintaining the canals, and optimising agricultural productivity in a harsh environment.
“The original furrows were constructed more than 500 years ago by a people who mysteriously disappeared as the present inhabitants, the Marakwets, migrated into the area. The Marakwets showed a high level of ingenuity in expanding and improving the system; taking the water across ridges and over valleys to places many miles from its original course,” the County government, which promotes the systems as a tourist attraction, mentioned in its comments on the irrigation system.
While the Marakwet irrigation system stands out in terms of age and innovation, various Kenyan communities have traditionally used different harvesting and storage practices based on the local conditions, Wangai Ndirangu, a water engineer working as a consultant at Be Associates — a Nairobi-based engineering consultancy group.
“So you find that communities in semi-arid northern Kenya regions where land is mainly used to keep livestock, water management systems are directly linked to range management… this is primarily driven by the need to have adequate water for animals,” Ndirangu explained.
“For the reasons the systems in place here are more elaborate and have been practiced for a very long time,” he noted while exemplifying the Borana indigenous systems in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, where range management is an integral part of water planning and use, owing to the arid area conditions in the region.
The systems have stood the test of time and have been adapted over centuries to cope with the harsh climatic conditions, said Francis Muhoho, a conservationist and and the chairperson of the Bathi Water Resources Users Association in central Kenya.
These include Sand Dams primarily used in the arid and semi-arid counties of South Eastern Kenya, usually simple, low-cost stone barriers built across seasonal riverbeds catching water during the rainy season, to slow down runoff and increase groundwater recharge.
In the hilly areas of central Kenyan communities, Rock Catchment systems are used, where natural rock surfaces are used to collect rainwater runoff, which is then channelled into surface reservoirs mostly in places with rocky terrain, Muhoho explained.
Innovations such as earthen dams and excavated depressions designed to collect and store storm water during the rainy season, are essential for providing water for livestock and domestic use during the dry periods common in semi-arid areas of Eastern Kenya.
They are complemented by shallow wells dug by communities to access groundwater. The wells are often lined with stones or other materials to prevent their collapse.
“These systems have been passed down through generations and continue to play a vital role in ensuring water security in many Kenyan communities. They are often complemented by modern water harvesting techniques to enhance water availability and resilience to climate change,” Muhoho said.
“These traditional rainwater-harvesting practices have been perfectly sustainable for many years. The reason for this is that they are compatible with local lifestyles, local institutional patterns and local social systems,” he added.
While many systems have survived for centuries, the only reason they have done so is due to lack of interference from authorities, rather than owing to support from the quarters — as explained by Violet Matiru of Millennium Community Development Initiatives, an environmental and natural resources management membership community group.
Where the authorities have sought to play a role in management of such systems, the result has been ‘commoditisation’ of the resource, putting it out of reach of many or total collapse of the schemes in some cases, Matiru noted.
According to Kenya National Harvesting and Storage Strategy 2020-2025 developed in 2021, over two thirds of the country receive less than 500 mm of rainfall per year and 79 per cent has less than 700 mm annually.
Only 11 per cent of the country receives more than 1,000 mm per year making harvesting inevitable to bring water closer to the people and contribute to the right to water.
“Rainwater harvesting has been carried out in Kenya since 1900s but only gained momentum in the last few decades with aggravation of water scarcity. Rainwater harvesting is key in building resilience occasioned by weather variability and climate change,” the document noted.
It acknowledged that, “Kenya needs to have a strategic reserve of water stored for use during emergencies and unforeseen periods of drought. This can only be achieved through integrated planning, sustainable financing and water harvesting and storage infrastructure development. The participation of all key stakeholder”.
Overall Kenya, a drought prone country situated near the Horn of Africa, has hundreds of planned but stalled conventional harvesting and storage projects across the country valued at over $22 billion. They include dams and water pans at the feasibility, design, proposal or different implementation stages.
The country risks losing the opportunity for attaining Sustainable Development Goals as marked by the United Nations. These goals pertain to eradicating hunger, provision of providing clean drinking water and clean energy respectively.