Increasing availability of water over time

Underground water storage tank from harvested rainwater at one of the farms participating in CARE's permaculture initiative. Farm in Bayoudeh. Photo: Kitchen Caravan.

Improving the availability of water over time is one of the technical measures to increase the resilience of WASH systems, as more water is available to span increasing length of dry seasons, or, relevant to agriculture, short dry spells. Different options are:

• Methods to improve the siting and construction of physical structures in order to make them less prone to failure and more efficiently used.
• Suitable storage methods that take into account the high rain intensity that falls for short time periods in many areas – such storage needs to be able to not only store enough volume of water to last through many months of dry season and/or drought, but also needs to be able to limit evaporation.
• Suitable management of a variety of water sources, where for example open water sources are used first so that most is used rather than evaporated, leaving other stored water for later.