As drought continues to take a terrible toll in the Horn of Africa, we are working on an effective and low-cost way to help prevent future food crises among livestock-herders in the region’s desert villages.
Drive through Somaliland’s dry, dusty desert, hours off-road from any city, and you will find people living out here in small villages, relying on herds of livestock for their survival.
But the region’s deadly drought has had a calamitous impact in these pastoral communities. Without water, their livestock have died at an alarming rate, leaving people weak from a lack of food and milk.
“This drought has been the worst of my lifetime,” says 70-year-old Suleman Mohamed Jirde, community leader in the desert village of Jama Qamar. “In other droughts, we still had a little water, but this time there was no water anywhere.”
Traditionally, villages have been able to store huge quantities of rainfall in large cisterns called berkads. But many of these berkads have developed cracks and they are no longer able to store water.
“We have 30 goats left,” says Khadja Hassan Mohamed, a widow raising six children on here own in Jama Qamar—children who have grown increasingly sick and malnourished during the drought. “Before the drought, I had around 100 goats, but the others have all died.”
Livestock Crisis
This terrible drought threatens the lives of 12 million people in the Horn of Africa. Families lack sufficient food and need special feeding programmes to save the lives of their malnourished children. In response, Medair is running nutrition programmes for children in several high-need regions of Somaliland.
But in a drought like this, there is also an urgent need for water—not only for people to drink, but also to keep livestock alive. In fact, providing water for livestock is one of the keys to preventing famine in desert regions.
“The food crisis in the Horn is essentially a livestock crisis,” said Mr. Lloyd Le Page, CEO of the U.N.-sponsored Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), at a recent conference on the food crisis. “The best way to prevent famine in arid lands is to ensure access to critical dry season grazing and water areas for livestock.”
Water is a major part of our integrated response to the crisis. In the first several months of 2011, Medair trucked 1.3 million litres of water into 30 villages including Jama Qamar. “Our camels drink a lot of water, about 100 litres every week,” says Suleman. “Medair sent 16 tankers to us, so Medair is good in our eyes.”
Water trucking is an emergency measure to urgently save lives, but it is a costly and unsustainable solution for desert communities over the longer term. Productive wells are virtually unheard of because the water table is so low here (150 to 250 metres deep), requiring deep-well drilling that is extremely expensive.
As everyone in these desert villages knows, the most viable solution is to save and store rainfall in berkads. While rains here are infrequent, when they come, they provide a vital resource that can be harvested before it vanishes into the dry earth.
“Each drop of water is precious to us,” explains Mohamed Mohamed, chairman of Kaladhac village. “We can’t even describe the importance, because it’s much greater than we can tell you. Water is life. Our life is based on water availability.”
Repairing Berkads
Berkads are like large cisterns—you might think of them almost like big swimming pools—where the ground slopes toward them, forcing rainwater to flow into the berkad through a silt trap, and capturing the water within. “The berkads are the reason we are here,” says Mohamed. “If they were not here, we would all move.”
With so many berkads in disrepair, pastoralists struggle to keep their livestock alive during droughts. Without livestock, they have few other sources of food, milk, or income, and soon enough, once-healthy families can become malnourished, potentially displaced in search of water and food, and in need of assistance to survive.
In response, we are working with remote desert communities to rehabilitate their berkads and secure long-lasting sources of water for families and their livestock. A full berkad can store water for up to 250 people for six months without requiring any more rainfall—and with those repairs, the berkads will last for at least 20 years.
Low Cost, High Impact In Jama Qamar, we rehabilitated an enormous berkad, one with a capacity of 750,000 litres. Before we started working on it, it was just a hole in the ground. “This is the first berkad we have had rehabilitated by an international organisation,” says Suleman. “We know it will last a long time now.”
When Medair’s Mark Toews visited Sibidley village, he was shocked to see how full the berkad had become after just one rain. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Mark. “The one we had rehabilitated had filled more than halfway after one very large rain. Fifty metres away, there was a broken berkad that didn’t have a drop of water inside. That’s the difference a rehabilitated berkad can make.”
“When the rains came, and the water came into our berkad, we were very happy and excited,” says Mohamed, in Kaladhac village. “We felt like someone who has lost his precious possessions and then gets them back, or as if we were poor and suddenly became rich.”
For the huge impact they can have on people’s lives, the cost of repairing a berkad is surprisingly low. We can repair a berkad for USD 8,400, which provides a sustainable source of water for 250 people for the next 20 years. With that berkad, families have water to keep their livestock alive, which helps them ward off future food crises—while also helping them survive the one that’s happening now.
While Medair continues to urgently treat malnourished children in Somaliland, we are also repairing berkads to help save lives and improve the chances of preventing future food crises.
One berkad costs USD 8,400, which means that your gift of USD 150 can provide a family of five with a sustainable source of water for the next 20 years.