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The second kind has been for ‘Water Friendly Farmers’,

teaching people to farm in the semi-arid conditions of

much of the basin, using water harvesting techniques for

crops and drinking, self-sufficiency of livestock keeping

and waste reuse. This latter training has been undertaken

by a teacher, Josphat Macharia, on his 5-acre plot that

sustains his extended family with much output to spare.

It has been calculated that his land can feed 30 people and,

as such, his methods provide a clear beacon for future land

management in the face of increased pressure from climate

change. Trainees have undertaken to go home and further

train another 10 people each in their workplace, home

location or church community.

The training camps have also supported members of

SHGs that were in receipt of physical improvements.

These have taken the themes of erosion control, water

efficiency and water quality. Erosion control projects

have built dams in dry gullies that experience flash floods

to hold back sediment from entering the lake, and intro-

duced tree-planting schemes on steep land in headwaters.

Water efficiency projects have provided water harvesting

for schools where the teachers and governors have agreed

to create vegetable plots and tree nurseries with the chil-

dren. They have also targeted SHGs growing vegetables

where water is in limited supply, such as a pan dam for a

women’s group that leases and farms 10 acres of arid land

and a youth group that built its own greenhouse but could

only access water from streams far away. Water quality

projects have provided cleaner water for collection from

dams in an innovative way that also provides biodiversity

restoration, funded through the REWE Group.

The REWE Group project, ‘Papyrus Restoration’,

focuses on projects that restore the papyrus fringe around

Lake Naivasha. Artificial islands are being planted onshore

in ponds with papyrus. When established, these will be

anchored offshore in selected locations, to spread and

grow into an established swamp to protect the lake from

sediment and enhance fish growth and reproduction.

Restoration in the catchment is focused on a few of the

many artificial dams left over from colonial farming, now

in disrepair. Projects have assisted SHGs with fencing and

building materials; the groups have erected the fencing,

strengthened the dams and built cattle drinking troughs

with water taps below the dams. The communities that

surround the dams can now access water no longer

contaminated by cattle and cleaned by the natural wetland

plants that had been eliminated by grazing or trampling.

Water cooperation in the future

By the middle of 2013, all the initiatives designed to

unite water users in the Naivasha basin are bearing fruit;

although each action is small, they are like a pebble in a

pond, spreading ripples ever outward. There is an enor-

mous amount still to do, to achieve a sustainable basin

with inhabitants no longer in poverty. Imarisha’s SDAP

vision – “A clean, healthy and productive environment

and sustainable livelihoods in the Lake Naivasha basin

for the benefit of the present and future generations”

– is at the beginning of a long road to achievement.

national conference on climate change and asked if he could help. Staff

of the Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit then made

a field visit and a rapid environmental and economic appraisal of the

catchment, which stimulated the creation of a newmanagement organi-

zation by the Government of Kenya, called Imarisha Naivasha. In 2012

Imarisha produced its Sustainable Development Action Plan (SDAP)

2012-17, requiring the development of a monitoring programme for

lake health and a database of information to support the “enabling

conditions for effective water regulation and governance, sustainable

land and natural resource use and sustainable development in the lake

Naivasha Basin”.

The third series of events came from European retailers – the

direct buyers of cut flowers – who began to fund small projects

that would act as demonstration successes, to be repeated across the

catchment as Imarisha and the initial PES grew to facilitate catch-

ment-wide sustainability. Some of these ‘early wins’ were projects

from UK retailers and Dutch and Swedish governments, funded

through Imarisha. Others were directly funded by two European

retailers that prize their commitment to sustainability – the German

REWE Group and Swiss Coop – through the universities of

Leicester and Nairobi. These universities have the longest-running

research partnership at Lake Naivasha, since 1982, which has been

responsible for most of the ecological understanding of the lake

described above.

The Coop-funded project, entitled ‘Sustainable Roses and Water’,

focused on promoting water efficiency among users and training

them to recognize it as a finite resource. The central part of this has

been two kinds of five-day residential training camps for horticul-

tural workforce officials, WRUA committee members and members

of self-help groups (SHGs) that are also being assisted by the physi-

cal demonstration projects.

The first kind of training camp has been for ‘Water Ambassadors’,

where people are taught about the water cycle fromglobal to local scales,

about cleaning wastewater for environmental acceptability, purifying

raw water for domestic use and about the ecology of Lake Naivasha.

Teacher Josphat Macharia training Water Friendly Farmers

Image: Nic Pacini