Excellent! - excellentdevelopment.com

The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) have been a tremendous support to Excellent Development Kenya over the last three years, providing much of the vital funds needed for our dam building programmes. Here Jim Bowman, Kenya Country Representative for MCC, reflects on his time supporting Excellent Development and his passion for sand dams.

---

Extracting a resource, while at the same time building up or adding to that same resource is an unusual win-win scenario. This is what is accomplished with the implementation of the “sand dam technology” developed by Excellent Development. Water scarce communities in Kenya are building up the historical levels of ground water in their land even as they extract clean and abundant water for their own needs.

In this innovative technology, a low tech concrete dam is built across a seasonal river gulley. Sand and water are trapped upstream from the dam. The sand serves as a holding medium for the water, which is kept safe from evaporation from the tropical sun. Over time, the water recharges the ground aquifers along the gulley. At the same time, community folks can dig into the sand to access a clean and sustainable water supply. Over time, the whole river valley starts to “green up” as plants and trees find the ground water.

It has been a privilege for me, as Country Representative for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Kenya, to collaborate with Excellent in the application of this important technology. In this partnership, we each have proscribed roles: Excellent develops the vision, draws up the work plans and implements the program. MCC, along with its funding partner, Canadian Food Grains Bank (CFGB), supports this program with a grant. Currently, we are in the middle of a five year agreement to build 170 dams. (Excellent actually builds more dams than this with funding from other sources.)

This technology is now tested and proven. In the years ahead, we anticipate that we together can facilitate the spreading of the technology to other regions in Africa and beyond, as appropriate.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that this technology is simply about building dams. More fundamentally, it is about engaging with communities in ways that empower them to solve their own problems. Dialogue with communities is conducted in such a way that both problems and solutions are owned by the same communities. For any given dam structure, the communities supply more than 50% of the total value of the investment for the dam, in the form of labor, sand and stone. An outcome of this is that at the conclusion of the construction process, communities experience a genuine sense of ownership in the dam, as well as the process that led up to it.

Once a water source is secured, communities are usually not content to just sit back and enjoy the water. Inspired by the successful community organization process that accompanied the building of the dam, they will start asking what else can be done. Then we begin to see tree nurseries, agricultural demonstration plots, innovative cropping systems, improved livestock, water tanks for schools, and much more. When one looks into the face of such communities, a healthy, can-do pride is etched on faces. We see communities transformed to new levels of self-reliance.

Indeed, the sand dam technology developed and implemented by Excellent is truly a win-win development scenario. MCC is proud to be associated with it.