ESIGODINI — For the smallholder farmers in arid Esigodini, just south of Bulawayo, the heavy downpours that have hit the area in recent months have been a Godsend.
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“We have not seen this much rain in years,” said farmer Brenda Zulu. The rains first came in January, destroying homes and claiming lives as people were caught unawares.
But farmers struggling to grow crops and raise livestock in the traditionally low-rainfall area surrounding Zimbabwe’s second-largest city realised that if they could find a way to harness the deluge, they could use it to help their thirsty farms.
So the villagers grouped together and started digging.
“It was a community suggestion that we dig the earth to trap the water,” said Zulu as she scooped water from an artificial pond her community created.
The size of a small tennis court, the pond now serves as a reservoir for scores of farms in the area.
She gets water for her garden from the pond and fills a trough for her small herd of livestock.
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“It seems to be helping a lot,” she said.
Nobody knows exactly how much water the makeshift ponds hold, but Zulu said her community believes theirs should have enough to sustain their small farms for the next few months.
With no access to groundwater and no sign of help from the local authorities to deal with worsening shortages, Zulu and her fellow villagers feel that making their own ponds could be the only answer.
“It was already a depressed gulley and we extended it as no one seems to offer solutions for our water problems,” she said. “We did this ourselves.”
For the farmers in Esigodini, who have experienced successive years of drought, building a “lake” was an act of desperation, driven by the fear of not knowing when, or how much, rain will next fall. But experts say Zimbabweans can learn to adapt to changing and increasingly severe weather patterns.
Sobona Mtisi, a climate change researcher with the Overseas Development Institute — a London-based research group — said rainfall in Zimbabwe does appear to follow a pattern. By understanding that pattern, people should be able to prepare for the droughts and floods that have been afflicting the country, Mtisi said.
“Most villagers in the flood-prone areas are aware of the fact that in the past few decades the frequency and intensity of floods has been increasing,” Mtisi said.
Rainwater harvesting is nothing new among many communities in Zimbabwe, but it is usually done using small containers that are inadequate to meet longer-term needs of farmers.
The act of investing labour into digging the ground to trap the coming rain is an innovative step — one that more famers might decide they have to take.
