Providing clean, reliable water to communities across Kenya's arid lands
Water Access is the cornerstone of everything ASDF does. In Kenya’s semi-arid regions, communities spend hours every day walking to collect water — often of poor quality. Our sand dam technology changes that permanently.
Our water access work combines several complementary technologies, each suited to a different part of the landscape:
A sand dam is a reinforced concrete wall built across a seasonal riverbed to capture and store water beneath sand, both filtering and protecting it. A sand dam holds millions of litres of water and are worlds low-cost water harvesting solutions, they enable communities to have all year access to water.
A shallow well is an abstraction system connected with a sand dam along the river bed to enable communities to obtain clean and safe water stored within the sand dam projects.
These are 104,000-litre rainwater harvesting tanks in schools which harvest and conserve rainwater for use during the dry periods.
These are rainwater harvesting systems which harvest water from large rock outcrops. They are constructed in areas where it is impossible to construct sand dams. The rock outcrops act as ‘roofs’ which harvest rain water into 190,000-litre tanks.
The Solar pipeline is a water abstraction system that allows water to be distributed from a sand dam project. A sump tank is built within a sand dam from where a submersible pump is connected to the solar system to pump water to storage tanks at an elevated point from where it can be accessed from a Kiosk.
Since 2010, ASDF has constructed over 734 sand dams serving more than 1.1 million community members. Each dam costs a fraction of conventional water infrastructure and lasts generations with minimal maintenance.