Bura district in general and Al-Ghaileen village (N 14.91119 E 43.47283 ) in particular are of mountinuous nature of almost 80% slope. The mountain slope is covered with terraces used for growing cash crops like Coffee, sorghum and qat. Terraces allowed soil and water conservation in the area. Water is available through erratic rainfall during summer. Rain water is the only source for human surviuval and agriculture. Community manage to harvest rain water and store it in underground cisterns for year round domestic use and as supplementary irrigation for limited cash crops. However, their efforts is limited by lack of financial resources to build more cisterns, harvest more rain water to cultivate more cash crops,conserve soil and improve their livelihood.
The aim of the project is to provide community with funding to build more cisterns in order to harvest more rain water for domestic and agriculture uses and eventually earn more income to live and maintain terraces. In this project the community is going to build 20 cisterns with total water holding capacity of 1505 cubic meter at the time. these are filled twice in the rainy seasom to make total water harvested is 3010 m3/year. The project is in support of country water policy, sustainability of resources and welfare of community in this area.
The project will estabilish a revolving fund from the cost recovery to aid community members to build more new cisterns in the years to come and to maitain the old. The local community have experts in building ground cisterns and water use effeciency. Women are the solely manage crops. The result of water harvesting can be 100% in crop harvest if coffee receive supplementary irrigation.
Moreover, having rain water harvested in cisitern will remove labour burden from women fetching water from long distances.