Achieving Food Security in Kenya By Promoting Rain Water Harvesting and Storage for Agricultural and Domestic use.

What is food security?

Food security means a situation in which all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs for an active healthy life.

What is Rain Water Harvesting and Storage?

Rain Water Harvesting and Storage may be defined as a method or a combination of methods for inducing, collecting, storing and conserving rain water for both agricultural and domestic use during the dry seasons.

Achieving food security in its totality continues to be a challenge in Kenya. While some parts of the country are suitable for agricultural-based food production activities, others are less endowed especially with availability of water for agricultural use. The difference lies in the magnitude of the problem in terms of its severity and proportion of the population affected in different parts of the country. Food security means a situation in which all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs for an active healthy life. It’s affected by a complexity of factors mainly those related to availability of water. Others include but not limited to unstable social and political environments, natural resource constraints, poor human resource base, gender inequality, inadequate education, poor health, war & civil strife, micro & macroeconomic trade imbalances and natural disasters such as floods and droughts. All these factors contribute to insufficient access to food by households and individuals.

Justification

Millions of people in Kenya continue to face desperate food shortages following inadequate rainfall levels especially for purposes of agricultural activities. The situation is made even worse by the over-reliance on rainfall for such agricultural activities. Food insecurity is closely linked to poverty. Food insecure areas in Kenya are the embodiment of poverty, some of it extreme. Availability of water for agricultural and domestic uses has serious implications on people’s food security and especially the chronically food insecure areas whose people suffer from extreme poverty. About 80% of Kenya’s populations reside in the rural areas where agriculture is the mainstay and by extension Kenya’s economy is about 80% dependent on agriculture.

COMMITTED TO ACCESSIBLE, SUFFICIENT, SAFE AND NUTRITIOUS FOOD FOR ALL AND AT ALL TIMES

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