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How Lush Hillside Farms Are Protecting Nairobi’s Water Supply
For many years, Esther Wandia Kiguru lived a tough life of labor up in Kenya’s misty highlands. The single mother toiled away at her tea plantation on the steep hillsides of the Aberdare Mountains, earning a living to support her three children.
But that changed when local authorities and private businesses began to recognize the importance small-scale farmers like Wandia — whose land is in a watershed that supplies the majority of the capital city Nairobi’s drinking water — could have.
“I was an ordinary peasant farmer before,” says the 62-year-old, sitting beside her newly built, modern brick home in the hills. “But my life changed completely.”
Esther Wandia Kiguru. Credit: Peter Yeung
In 2018, local authorities contacted Wandia in the hope of transforming the way that she managed her land. First, the officials offered to help to install a 50,000-liter reservoir that would allow her to collect rainwater and cultivate different types of crops such as avocados, bringing in greater profits while stabilizing the surrounding terrain.
Wandia, enticed by what was a rare opportunity in Kenya’s remote Muranga County, quickly agreed. “It was like a blessing from God,” she says.
The initiative was part of the Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund, which was launched in 2015 by the international nonprofit The Nature Conservancy to connect companies and communities in Kenya with the goal of cleaning up important water sources. The approach is showing a successful way of maintaining and even improving the supply of water to urban populations while simultaneously providing income to rural areas.
The Upper Tana River Basin, which spans 1.7 million hectares, supplies 95 percent of Nairobi’s drinking water, helps to sustain important biodiversity, drives agricultural activities that feed millions and provides half of the country’s hydropower output.
Thanks to an initiative from the Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund, Wandia is able to collect rainwater on her land. Credit: Peter Yeung
Yet high population growth in the basin over the past few decades as well as an increase in unsustainable agriculture mean that sturdy forests that previously prevented erosion have been replaced by short-term cash crops, and that water pollution has risen due to sediment being washed into the watershed and trash produced by locals. This is far from a local issue: The UN considers the issue of water quality degradation to be one of the main challenges societies across the planet will face during the 21st century.
The Water Fund, which uses a private-public financing model, takes investment from companies downstream in Nairobi and passes it onto farmers living in the watershed. In effect, Kenyan breweries and water companies that need reliable water in the city pay into the fund, which then disburses money to people upstream to buy tools and improve their practices in ways that conserve water and improve their livelihoods.
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“We’re working from top to tap,” says Edith Alusa, executive director at Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund Trust, which now manages the project.
All across the region, hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers like Wandia have been given infrastructure like roof gutters, drainpipes, storage tanks and pans to collect rainwater. In turn, they must adopt more sustainable practices such as using organic fertilizers, diversifying their crops and avoiding planting crops like eucalyptus directly beside rivers and streams, which can increase erosion and sediment overflow.
Caro Nguru, who leads the project for Muranga County, one of four local authorities involved in the fund, says that the decision to provide tools, seeds and infrastructure rather than cash in particular has meant farmers are more motivated to change their behavior. “It’s more effective than money transfers,” she says.
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