At our peace center we installed a 5000-liter tank that captures the water from the roof of our training center. It works very well and fills up completely after a rain shower. However, the tank is not big enough to sustain our organic garden for even a mont. Also this method needs a big roof to capture the rain water. This roof also needs to be very close to the garden. That is not available to most of the farmers so this method can only work in a few places Next we tested digging a swale. This is simply a hole in the ground that captures the rainwater from the land above. We dug a swale of 3000 liter to see if it would fill up after a rain shower and to see if the swale would contain the water. The swale did fill up very quickly when it rained but the water sunk in the ground in couple of days.

Thinking about it I realized we need a watertight container that sits below the ground so I can capture the water from the area above. It also needs to be a closed container in order to be safe and so it should be a closed container. See above the container/reservoir that is being built in Gundani village. It can hold more than 20.000 liters of water which should be enough to water the garden in dry period of one month. The idea is that the rainwater enters through the pipe. The top still has to be built.

See above the design of the underground water container / reservoir. The light brown area represents the earth. The idea is that rainwater will pour through the holes. Once this container has been succesfully tested, we will contruct these in more villages