12/23/2023 Big farm mobile harvest farm cup event objectives find soccer balls when harvestingRead Now![]() He paid for his system, which cost more than $1,000, using profits from a small business he owns, he said. Only about five percent of households have installed the systems, largely because most cannot afford them, Matongo said. Nevertheless, rainwater harvesting has been slow to gain widespread traction in the region of 80,000 people, where much of the land is barren apart from drought-resistant acacia and mopani trees. But the borehole produces so little water at the peak of the dry season that storing rainwater has become a necessity, he said. Water from the borehole normally is used for gardening and livestock, as well as bathing and laundry, Matongo said. His family uses the water collected from the rooftops mainly for drinking and cooking and augments it with water from a borehole well, he said. To take him through the dry season, Matongo has installed one concrete tank and two steel ones with a combined capacity of more than 10,000 litres. Many people around here are doing likewise.” BIG BENEFIT, BIG COST? “My sister has a 5,000-litre tank at her homestead. “We have made a lot of strides in rainwater harvesting,” Matongo said. Over the past five years, a number of new rainwater systems have been installed in the area as rains grow more erratic - a result of climate change and last year’s El Niño weather phenomenon, which brought devastating drought to large swathes of Zimbabwe. Such home rainwater harvesting system are becoming a more familiar sight in this part of eastern Zimbabwe as droughts intensify and people search for solutions to worsening water shortages. It means enough water for my family during the dry season.” “If the rains continue like this, my tanks will be full very soon. ![]() “We are harvesting rainwater from our rooftops and I have three tanks which are almost full,” Matongo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The spartan system allows Matongo to collect enough water to get through the dry season – an ever more difficult task in this arid, sparsely populated area of Zimbabwe’s Manicaland province. Triangular metal gutters run below the corrugated roofs on all the buildings at his home, transporting water into storage tanks below. ![]() ![]() MARANGE, Zimbabwe (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Kuziwa Matongo’s rainwater harvesting system may not look like much, but its impact is huge. ![]()
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