PitchAfrica, a non-profit design group founded by British architects Jane Harrison and David Turnbull, has designed the Waterbank School, a campus capable of harvesting and storing rainwater. The campus is located at the Endana Secondary School in Laikipia, Kenya. The design for the campus structures includes a stadium, classrooms, dormitories for the students, canteens and latrines.
The campus structures were designed to serve the dual purpose of functioning as educational spaces while storing high volumes of potable water at a low cost, providing the community and students with clean drinking water and irrigation for the agriculture plots that form a patchwork across the campus.
The Waterbank campus allows children, who usually spend daylight hours collecting water for their families, the opportunity to attend school.
The secondary school includes the jewel of the campus – the Samuel Eto’o football Stadium. The stadium seats 1 500 spectators and the stands are capable of storing four to eleven million litres of rainwater. PitchAfrica is currently finalising the design and construction drawings for a simple, low-cost Waterbank clinic. The drawings will be available in an open source file from the PitchAfrica website as a key part of their open source initiative.
A new development in PitchAfrica’s Waterbank initiative is the open sourcing of an online manual of instructions for how to build Waterbank buildings for other school groups in other arid regions of Africa.
The girls' dormitory on the Waterbank campus has recently been completed as well as the complete irrigation of 10 acres of agricultural plots surrounding the campus, created to feed the students and community. The project is being implemented and rolled-out through a partnership between PitchAfrica and the locally based Zeitz foundation.
The video is courtesy of PitchAfrica.
