9th International Rainwater Catchment Systems Conference
"Rainwater Catchment: An Answer to the Water Scarcity of the Next Millennium."
Petrolina, Brazil - July 1999

Section 12: Posters

Paper 12.21

Rainwater Catchment: An Educational Program

Domingos Magalhães Neto & Egnaldo Gomes Xavier
Associação dos Pequenos Agricultores do Municipio
Valente, BA
E-mail: apaebvalente@gd.com.br

The EFA (Escola Família Agrícola--Rural Family School) in its courses on life with the semiarid region for the students of APAEB (Associação dos Pequenos Agricultores do Município de Valente - BA-- Small Farmers' Association of Valente, Bahia County), is also teaching rainwater catchment and storage.

The school has 5 cisterns (of bricks and cement) with a capacity of 40.000 liters, and another one with a capacity of 25.000 liters. All these cisterns collect water from the school's buildings. We also have a small dam that can store about 9,000, 000 liters and two water holes with a total holding capacity of 500,000 liters. Besides this, the school has 2 tubular wells with salty water with a small flow of 1200 and 1300 liters.

Given that consumption is high, it is necessary to manage the available water:

• Cistern water is only used for drinking and cooking.
• The dam water is used for watering plants, rainworm farm and the garden as well as for taking baths and cleaning the kitchen.
• The salty well water is used for flushing toilets, cleaning the stables, filling the fish tanks and for the animals. In one of the wells a solar desalinator was installed and it supplies 500 liters of drinking water a day.

The cisterns supply enough drinking and cooking water for the school's students. The desalintor supplies drinking water for other events such as meetings or courses held by APAEB.

Based on the program established by the school, 250 families (that is 80% of the APAEB associates) are already using rainwater from cisterns.

PDF of full document available to members (2pp, 34kb)