"The time has come to realize the great potential for greatly enhancing drinking water supplies and smallholder agricultural production by harvesting more of the rain when and where it falls," said Dennis Garrity of WAC.

"Africa is seen as a dry continent (but) it actually has more water resources per capita than Europe," he said in the report released on the sidelines of a UN climate change conference here.

Currently 14 of Africa's 53 countries are classified as "water stressed" or "water scarce" and that figure could double by 2025, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

But collecting, storing and distributing captured rainwater could cheaply provide water security for nearly all of Africa's more than 800 million people it said.

"When we talk about water in Africa it is very often in the context of despair," said UNEP chief Achim Steiner. "But there is a tremendous amount of potential in rain water harvesting ... a technique as old as humanity's attempt to survive on this planet."

In Kenya, annual rainfall could supply its 32 million inhabitants with up to seven times more water than they need, the report said.

Ethiopia, where only a fifth of the country's 70 million people benefit from its current water supply, receives enough rain a year to supply 520 million people total, it said.

Rainwater harvesting is simple, easily transferrable to rural communities most effected by water scarcity and produces quick and noticeable results, the report said.

"To harvest rainwater, you just need water," said Elizabeth Khaka, who sets up harvesting programs in rural Kenya. "As long as it rains, you can store it."

Collection and storage of 1,000 litres (227 gallons) of rainwater costs 30 to 70 dollars (23-55 euros), as opposed to hundreds of millions of dollars/euros to transport and pump it to needy areas, it said.

The benefits are clear in at least one rural Kenyan community in Africa's Great Rift Valley.

"Rainwater harvesting has helped us very much," said Agnes Mosoni Loirket, a Maasai tribeswoman who lives in Kajiado district 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Nairobi. "Before it came to our community, we suffered quite a bit.

"Before our children had to walk five, ten kilometers to collect water and it was not clean water, it carried a lot of diseases," the mother of five, dressed in full tribal regalia, told reporters here.

earlier related report
Killer floods wreak havoc as Kenya hosts UN climate change meet
Nairobi (AFP) Nov 13 - Devastating floods triggered by unusually heavy seasonal rains have swept through north and coastal Kenya, killing at least 23 and forcing more than 70,000 from their homes, officials said Monday. Among the dead and displaced are Somali refugees at UN camps in northeast Kenya, where at least two people, a pregnant woman and a young child, drowned and 13,000 already homeless people were left without even scant shelter, they said.

Those fatalities brought to 23 the death toll across Kenya from three weeks of torrential downpours that have ravaged the country and displaced 60,000 Kenyans in addition to 12,600 Somali refugees at the UN's Dadaab complex.

And, with rains continuing, officials warned of further devastation, while delegates meet in Nairobi at a UN conference on climate change that many blame for altering weather patterns and causing deadly drought-flood cycles.

Ironically, at the conference on Monday, the United Nations was presenting a report on harnessing the "massive potential of rainwater harvesting in Africa," which it said could supply more than enough of the continent's needs.

Kenyan emergency workers were meanwhile struggling with the effect of harsh, unharvested rains and floodwater on an impoverished population.

"We have floods across the country and, since it is still raining, we fear the situation will deteroriate," said Abdi Ahmed, the acting disaster response chief at the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS).

At the weekend, at least six people, including a schoolgirl, were swept away and drowned by raging waters around the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa and the northeastern town of Garissa, officials said. Two others are missing.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said Monday that two of its three camps at Dadaab, about 470 kilometers (290 miles) northeast of Nairobi, had flooded beginning Friday, compounding the misery of nearly 90,000 Somali refugees.

It said two refugees had drowned and that 12,600 had been left without shelter at Dadaab's Ifo and Dagahaley camps, that it feared for the spread of water-borne diseases and that supply routes had been cut to the facilities.

The deaths and damage are just the latest from the unusually heavy October-to-December "short rains" season, that began to impact late last month.

Since then, at least 60,000 Kenyans -- 50,000 on the coast and 10,000 in the northeast -- have been forced from their homes by flood waters that have washed away crop fields, bridges and roads and destroyed numerous buildings.

"All these people are directly affected or completely cut off and we cannot access them," Ahmed told AFP.

On Saturday, the main road linking Mombasa, about 500 kilometers (300 miles) southeast of Nairobi, to Tanzania was cut off with four bridges washed away, a local official said.

"We are looking for water, shelter and medicine for the affected people, but in the long run we will be required to assist up to 200,000 people here," said Moffat Kangi, the commissioner of Kwale district just south of Mombasa.

The recent floods are not limited to Kenya, which is being hit as it hosts thousands of environmentalists and government delegates at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that ends this week.

The onset of rains has compounded problems across the Horn of Africa already brought by a recent killer drought, since parched soil inundating the worst-affected areas is unable to absorb the water, officials said.

In Somalia, floods have killed at least 42 and displaced 10,000 people over the past two weeks, compounding the misery affecting millions in the lawless Horn of Africa nation.

In Ethiopia, flooding from late October rains that burst the banks of several rivers has killed at least 68 people and affected some 280,000 people, according to officials there.

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