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==History and social context==
Rainwater falls on your own roof, and is almost always of excellent quality. It enables people to manage their own water supply and provides the luxury of “water without walking”, relieving the burden of water carrying, particularly for women and children. This convenience is available at every house on which rain falls, whether on a mountain top or an island in a salt sea.
A rainwater harvesting system might be a 500 cubic meter underground storage tank, serving a whole community, or it might be just a bucket, standing underneath a roof without a gutter. Each 20 litre container of clean water might save a kilometers long walk to the nearest source of clean water, and as fetching water on cold, wet and slippery days is particularly unpleasant, even this small yield is highly valued. In Uganda and Sri Lanka, rainwater is traditionally collected from trees, using banana leaves or stems as temporary gutters.
It is a technology which is extremely flexible and adaptable to a wide variety of settings, it is used in the richest and poorest societies on the planet, and in the wettest and driest regions of the world.
==Suitable conditions ==
