Mennonite
Central
Committee

Kitui Sand Dams: A Development Paradigm

By Sam M. Mutiso & Prof. G-C.M. Mutiso

Introduction: Towards sand dams

SASOL started as a usual intermediation Kenyan nongovernmental organization dealing with drought and capacity building in 1990. The foundation years led to identifying the water constraint especially for school feeding. This led to the realization that water was a constraint to the further development of the Kitui society. SASOL then developed the concept of production water composed of green and blue water.

When SASOL launched the Kitui sand dam programme it was a leap of faith, for it did not understand two key variables: community ability to finance investment in production water and the positive dramatic environmental and socio-economic since the technology is so simple that nobody else had done it in large scale. Most of the ideas existing in 1996 about sand dams were patchy and unconvincing both at the technological level and the social level. Further in a world reeling with technological advances of the 80s and 90s decades, simple structures had no place in the scheme of things.

Three points are important. First, the strength of the programme was the belief that though the sand dam technology was simple, underneath the simplicity was enormous underlying potential for social organization, which could be tackled on a dam-to-dam basis. Secondly, scarcity of water is usually associated with lack of drinking water, but the technology would produce both green water and blue water in the longer term. Thirdly, the community was to be involved totally in the development of the cascade of sand dams as a base line asset on which the developmental process would be built on subsequently.

The implication of these inter-related points is that the sand dam construction was both an experiment in social and environmental engineering. In SASOL's view the social engineering aspect is what drives the paradigm. This is based on several conceptual ideas found in tradition but tempered by the emergent social systems as well as choosing a project technology and a development strategy, which does not enrich poverty. The overall vision is to enable the Kitui poor to generate life and assets. This is to be achieved by relying on collective self-help, enhancing individual and collective accumulation thereby assuring growth through community control and distribution of access to development assets. Finally it is to give the Kitui poor capacity to deal with globalization.

The target group

It is estimated that the annual per capita cash income in Kitui District is Ksh. 2,000, i.e. USD $25. This is way below the currently accepted international poverty benchmark of USD $1 per day. Although it is possible to quibble with the statistics on the annual per capita cash income as well as the fact that there are non-cash exchange systems operating in Kitui district, and further that there are some rich people in the district, there can be absolutely no quarrel with the fact that the bulk of the population is very poor.

Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, eloquently defines the poor and the strategy towards enabling their growth. We quote him extensively:

"The growth-poverty debate is about development strategies — strategies that look for policies that reduce poverty as they promote growth, that shun policies that increase poverty with little if any growth, and that in assessing situations where there are tradeoffs, put a heavy weight on the impact on the poor.

"Understanding the choices requires understanding the causes and nature of poverty. It is not that the poor are lazy: they often work harder, with longer hours, than those who are better off. Many are caught in a series of vicious spirals: lack of food leads to ill health. Barely surviving, they cannot send their children to school, and without an education, their children are condemned to a life of poverty. Poverty is passed along from one generation to another. Poor farmers cannot afford to pay the money for fertilizers and high-yielding seeds that would increase their productivity.

"In poor countries …the impoverished have no source of energy other then the neighboring forest; but as they strip the forests for their bare necessities of heating and cooking, the soil erodes, and as the environment degrades, they are condemned to a life of ever-increasing poverty.

"Along with poverty comes feelings of powerlessness …he poor feel that they are voiceless, and that they do not have control over their own destiny. They are buffeted by forces beyond their control.

"And the poor are insecure. Not only is their income uncertain — changes in economic circumstances beyond their control can lead to lower real wages and loss of jobs …They face health risks and continual threats of violence, sometimes from other poor people trying against all odds to meet the needs of their family, sometimes from police and others in positions of authority. …The only safety net is provided by family and community, which is why it is important, in the process of development, to do what one can to preserve these bonds." (Globalization and Its Discontents, pp. 82-84. London: Penguin, 2002.)

Towards this end, affirming collective self-help of the Kitui population is key.

Collective self help

Kamba society historically defines each individual as a member of the community as well as the totality of the Kamba community. The survival of the community depends on its members, and, vice-versa, the survival of the individual depends on the actions of the community. This is assured through palaver. It assures collective self help — usually misunderstood as communal self-help.

In collective self-help there is a bifurcation of the roles of the individual. Firstly the individual persons or households have selfish roles aimed at their survival per se. Secondly there are actions, which are undertaken by the individuals or individual households in conjunction with others. Several levels of interactions exist. The lowest level, which is the smallest unit in traditional communities, is the neighborhood or village, historically made of clansmen but not so today. The intermediate level is the clan. The highest level of interaction, which is tantamount to the global level, is the tribe.

Tasks which need to be undertaken for individual and collective survival are matched with the appropriate structure and level. For example when there is an external attack it calls on the tribal warriors to action, as an organized warfare and ideologies exist only at the global level. On the other hand, social reproduction, economic production/accumulation and protection of property take place at the family and neighborhood levels. For example, if an individual homestead is on fire, it is the neighbors who come to the rescue. Further, Kambas say, "You do not set up a cattle camp alone" (Mundu ndatwaa kyengo e weka), thereby affirming that the process of accumulation is collective even for the rich.

For the development of sand dams, the community is involved at the individual, family and village level. The individual has the dual role of participating in the communal activity as well as developing the individual land to enhance the harvesting of water in the catchment hence increasing both green and blue water potential in the locality.

The intermediation role is community organizing, which is the process of mobilizing the local resources and sensitizing communities in order to improve the quality of life through collective self-help. It is paramount. The key is to facilitate communities to put in place organizational structures that are functional and conducive to achieving individual and collective goals. In the case of the sand dam construction, the immediate goal is to alleviate the scarcity of drinking water for humans and livestock. It is only when there is surplus water that there is diversification into utilizing green and blue water for expanded production.

The presence of green and blue water opens vistas which have not existed before the construction of the sand dams. It challenges the historic organizational formats and processes. The adventurous individuals in the community lead the way in taking the opportunities provided by the water. This leads to the diversification of existing production systems. This gives new opportunities to those who have been left out in the historic models of social change and accumulation as they see new opportunities in the utilization of the water. The classic case is a lady who has less than an acre of land who was able to save for high school fees of her son during the first year of irrigating with dam water. Others join in the fray and changes start occurring in the community driven by the sand dam palaver.

Soon after the new tentative changes in production begin, through this palaver, the collective outlook to life changes. Attention starts being paid to conservation as land becomes a precious commodity and is seen as a serious pathway leading to individual, family, neighborhood and community riches.

This transformation needs new community organizational structures. The organization structure, which was instrumental in building the dams, is not deemed to be suitable for carrying forward the community, which now has different scale of global goals. The reasons are simply that technologies, markets and distribution channels are global, i.e. beyond the village. SASOL recognizes that this is the future of the project.

Individual and community accumulation

In the traditional Kamba society the wealth of a household was measured in livestock. Towards that end, a young boy was given a cow or a goat, usually financed in very structured socially defined process, to start his accumulation process. That cow or a goat would over time produce a herd as long as he was a good manager. The herd would be used to get a wife. The wife, in turn, was given land and livestock on being married. No woman was married without being given her mbee land, by her husband, to be passed by her to her progeny. If the new household continued to produce good managers, the family accumulation would be assured. The initial animals formed the asset base on which future assets were built by individuals, families and clans. With the assets, the individual, household or clan could afford to pay community obligations including producing warriors.

Developed and functional sand dams in cascades, with the supporting environmental catchment management, are creation of a base asset in the community. The large investment put in by the community; typically 60 percent of each dam's cost, through the provision household labor and community materials, buys the protection of the community asset.

The productivity of both the green and blue water energizes the capacity of the community to adapt to the new opportunities. This leads to the distribution of wealth in the community with the resultant savings and further investment and asset build up. It also raises demands on skills to handle the new processes. One primary need is that of an effective social organization to grapple with extremely new problems, such as transport of produce to the markets and marketing locally and globally. The salient technologies are accounting and electronics. If the community does not act to meet these demands, by default it will be surrendering its sweat to the external —global middlemen who would come and fill the gap. This scenario has low payback to the community, as the profits are taken away and invested elsewhere. The capacity building challenge of production in the marginalized areas is how to maximize the benefits of their production in an exploitive global system.

Community control and access to assets

In the traditional Kamba community, ethics and values were clearly defined and shared. Social norms had evolved over time and existed in the tribe as the distillate of trials of new ideas and refinement through adaptation. Finally there were codes of behavior, which were enshrined in the communal mind. The supreme organs of the community enforced them. These were King’ole and Ngolano whose edicts and judgments could not be breached, for the individuals would be thrown out of society: kukoowa – literally, to be spat out. Complete ostracization from society resulted. Few would dare to follow this route.

The coming of colonialism dislocated the existing system of values and ethics found in the conquered communities. The colonialists, through their agents — the educated, Westernized asomi — tried to replace these with their own values and ethics, which were irrelevant and never understood by many base communities. This state of affairs resulted in an artificial scenario, which gave rise to a small number of local exploitive elite, agents of the global. The elite, which was a collection of colonial loyalists, sought to gain all the advantages of colonialism by oppressing the populace for individual gain. Thus arose a differentiation in the base communities. The new value system operated in a vacuum because there was no mechanism to cater for the community but it thrived on favors bestowed on the loyalists.

In the postcolonial era, it is the colonial derived elite which came into power. This elite continued the marginalization of the larger community in the rural areas. It never dealt with tradition, as Mamdani effectively argues in Citizen and Subject. This era is characterized by false individualism, because there is none of the overall philosophy, which guides interactions at the household, clan or global levels. Ethics and values are individual and not collective.

This is not all. An overarching welfare state framework, as is in the West, which operates under the overall capitalism philosophy, does not control the rabid and false individualism. In the Western system, there are control measures where the state overseas the welfare of the citizens. Taxes fund governments, which in turn fill the role of wealth distribution by providing services. Individualism in postcolonial situations is seen, by the majority in base communities, who are poor, as a selfish accumulation with no responsibility or obligation towards production and social distribution. Concentration of wealth, stolen from the state, without relevant state distribution, leads to the polarization of society and extreme exploitation of the poor. This is exacerbated by the postcolonial state, which more often than not has not even heard of basic service provision as its core business, not to mention that it at times is a state of a tribe against others.

To incorporate base communities into growth development, what is needed is the provision of an impetus for the poor communities to break the vicious circle of poverty by producing and managing the resources they have for individual and community improvement. Due to the meager rural earnings, the only way out is to start at the traditional model where sweat investment, using locally available resources, can be shared to create collective assets, which will eventually create more wealth, and more community assets, enabling individuals in the community to use their industry to create both individual and communal wealth.

This, we not only believe but we get indicative incomes, evidence that the organization and mobilization to create water for production through sand dams in Kitui is systematically addressing poverty. We are planning a detailed economic study to document this.

Production water and globalization

In this setting of marginal lands and the attendant marginal communities, where the reality is subsistence agriculture, what is the role of globalization? Remember that globalization is that which is outside the village. It offers new knowledge to use hydroponics, drip irrigation, latest researched seeds and better land use to deal with global warming. It offers new knowledge, enabling the village to trade without middlemen through the Internet. It allows the leading universities to bring students to the Kitui experiment. It allows the meeting of the East, the Middle and the West. It allows a menu of organizational skills ranging from traditional to corporate. It allows exploitation if the communities are not taught – in the Paulo Frere "deschooling society" and "pedagogy of the oppressed" sense — a plethora of skills to buffer them. It allows for intermediation, which is not developmentalist.

In this sense the issue of globalization is not just markets but to use it to improve the lives of many millions of people to produce food, to generate surpluses to buy education, health and decent livelihood. The funding agencies or development intermediators do not easily understand this.

The key to success in addressing poverty is integration of traditional and modern social and technical knowledge in creating growth-oriented development structures and processes under the management of base communities. Ironically, this is African palaver par excellence.

SASOL Foundation Field Office
PO Box 85
Kitui, Kenya
(254) 044-22873

Liaison Office
PO Box 14333
Nairobi, Kenya
(254) 020-860772 or 802171