BRAZIL: Rainwater Tanks Represent Health and Hope for 100,000 Families

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 12 2005 (IPS) - Rainwater collection tanks have already made clean drinking water available to more than 100,000 families in Brazil, and the goal is to build one million by 2008, to ensure water supplies for all poor households in the country’s impoverished semiarid northeast.

The rainwater represents “health and hope” to families who in the past had to walk kilometres to carry home buckets of dirty water, says an informational brochure put out by ASA, an umbrella group that links more than 700 non-governmental organisations, trade unions, cooperatives and associations.

ASA was created in 1999 to promote development projects in the drought-stricken northeast, which is home to some 25 million people, a majority of whom live in poverty.

The group’s main aim is to come up with solutions that are adapted to the local climate and ecosystem, while opposing projects like large dams, which only favour a privileged minority and do not bring about sustainable development.

The organisation is also opposed to the government’s plan to divert water from the Sao Francisco river, which emerges in central Brazil and runs through part of the northeast, to supply other parts of the semiarid region.

Besides the high financial and environmental costs of the project, it would benefit only a few, while accentuating the concentration of water and land, according to ASA.

The programme, known as P1MC, was given a major boost in 2003 when it was incorporated into the government’s Zero Hunger policy, which also distributes food aid and grants to poor families and provides incentives for family farming.

The government of leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the largest source of funds for the One Million Cisterns programme, which also receives support from U.N. agencies, the Brazilian banking federation and foreign org anisations.

“An Italian couple who came to learn about the project donated money to build two water tanks and two houses, and promised to come back next year with new donations,” Cristiano Cardoso, a technical adviser to P1MC, told IPS, to illustrate the broad range of support drawn by the initiative.

Each rainwater collection tank costs a little over 1,500 reals (640 dollars) to build. The cost is kept down by the fact that the beneficiaries themselves provide the labour, while community solidarity funds are set up with donations from local residents, in order to build more tanks and address other community needs.

The water tanks are built next to every house in poor rural communities.

In Brazil’s semiarid northeast, rainfall amounts to at least 200 millimetres a year, enough to provide water supplies to a five-person household for a year if the water that falls on the rooftops is collected and stored.

The cylindrical tanks are built with pre-fabricated cement slabs. Each can hold up to 16,000 litres of water, and they are situated so as to collect all of the rainwater that drains off the roof of the house.

“This is not a programme run by governments or politicians, but rather by civil society,” says ASA, which sees social mobilisation and participation as indispensable.

The families who benefit from it participate in every phase of the construction and attend courses on the significance of the project and the care that is needed to collect the water and keep it clean.

The goal of completing one million tanks in three years seems overly ambitious in view of the progress made so far, Cardoso admitted. A total of 100,000 had been built as of late August, and speeding up the rate of construction will demand not only more resources, but above all an expansion of the network’s operating capabilities.

This expansion will require an increase in the number of Micro-Regional Management Units, which coordinate the project in a given area. There are currently only 51, and each can handle the construction of between 500 and 1,500 tanks a year, explained Cardoso.

Their work is not limited to building the tanks, but also encompasses training, community organising and environmental education. The full name of P1MC is the Training and Social Mobilisation Programme for Coexistence with the Brazilian Semiarid Region.

Antonio Xavier de Souza, a member of the Pipipan indigenous ethnic group, told IPS that while his rainwater storage tank, installed three years ago in the town of Floresta in the state of Pernambuco, is “very useful,” it does not guarantee a year-round supply of water for his family.

In 2004, when rainfall was heavy, the water lasted until September, but this year, which has been drier, they ran out in April, he said.

Since then, his family has been using the tank to store water that they collect from nearby reservoirs and wells and carry back on an ox-drawn cart.

Optimal use of the tank requires proper management of the water supply and expanding the capacity for collecting rainwater, noted Cardoso. If the roof of a house is too small, it is impossible to fill the tank. Each square metre of rooftop collects 75 litres of water when there are 100 millimetres of rain, he said.

In northeastern Brazil it rains between 400 and 800 millimetres a year on average, and at least 200 millimetres during the driest years, making this the semiarid region with the largest amount of precipitation in the world, ASA says. This means that in a good year, a 16,000-litre tank can be filled by 600 millimetres of rain falling on a 40-square-metre rooftop.

Now that one tenth of the goal for the rainwater cistern project has been achieved, ASA is preparing to branch out further with the One Land Two Waters Programme (P1+2).

This initiative was inspired by a successful experience in northern China, where the climate is similar, and the intensive use of rainwater with 2.5 million collection tanks allowed for agricultural development benefiting 1.1 million families.

In the new programme, the tank used to collect rainwater for human use, drinking and cooking will be combined with other technologies to capture and store water for family farming and raising small livestock, like chickens and goats.

Small underground reservoirs that reduce evaporation, ponds, “mandalas” (pyramid-shaped reservoirs used to irrigate circular gardens) and other techniques are currently being implemented as part of a pilot project, in preparation for wide-scale use.

There are also plans to equip 50,000 wells with a manual pump developed by Dutch expert Gert Jan Bom in the West African nation of Burkina Faso 20 years ago, which greatly facilitates the extraction of water.