By Karen Calabria
Kibwezi, Kenya - Elderly Boniface Musya struggles to raise a water-filled drum from the 23m well which he and his wife carved out of the bedrock for five long years with only a hammer and chisel.
Villagers gather round and eagerly alternate turns at the worn wooden crank. When the bucket is hoisted above ground, the lilting hum of Swahili chatter dwindles as Musya's neighbours marvel at the sight of water - a precious commodity in Kenya's increasingly arid southern rangelands.
"We dug this well but still do not have enough water," the septuagenarian Kamba tribesman said at his home 180km south of Nairobi.
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Musya, a maize farmer whose crops are often trampled by marauding elephants, has increased his income more than fourfold from the equivalent of $204 to $1 090 a year since enrolling in a United Nations-sponsored initiative to prevent land degradation in nine African countries.
But more than two-thirds of Musya's improved income results from selling water to neighbours and not the land conservation techniques he learned through the programme, a problem experts are hoping to change with a new programme.
On Monday, the United Nations and international lenders launched TerrAfrica, a coalition that will invest four billion dollars over 12 years to stem the expansion of deserts and promote sustainable land management as part of wider efforts to reduce Africa's crushing poverty.
More than 250 million people worldwide are affected by chronic food shortages and drought due to rapidly expanding deserts and the disappearance of arable land.
Africans are among the hardest hit with 43 percent of the continent considered extreme desert, effecting 65 percent of the population.
TerrAfrica will upscale current efforts, such as the UN's Desert Margins Programme, that train farmers like Musya in land conservation and finding alternative sources of income.
"One of the philosophies of the Desert Margins Programme is that the participant has to take land conservation technology and make it his own," Mohamed Sessay, of the UN, told reporters.
Despite small victories against desertification, the $50-million scheme, begun in 2002, has been largely unsuccessful in Kenya because it fails to address participants' most pressing needs, officials say.
"We are experiencing resistance because we don't have enough grass seeds or talk about the lack of water," said Linus Wekesa, of a Kenyan agroforestry group specialising in semi-arid areas.
In Kenya, where nearly 80 percent of the land is arid or semi-arid, most farmers rely on rainwater to sustain their crops and livestock. But water is becoming increasingly scarce due to the desertification.
Local agencies are trying to address the issue indirectly by teaching participants to harvest rainwater - a technique that provides little relief.
Musya began bee-keeping and growing fruit at the suggestion of the UN programme to alleviate his dependence on crops susceptible to an increasingly fickle climate. But convincing other farmers to do the same is difficult because they lack water.
"When we started planting trees my neighbours became interested," Musya said. "They began digging holes to plant trees but were soon discouraged because they have no water."
Lack of water is the primary constraint in implementing anti-desertification measures, officials say.
"The water component has to be developed as a priority of this programme to further the adoption of land conservation technology," Kenya Agricultural Research Institute's William Ngoyawu Mnene told researchers.
But it isn't the only issue needing to be addressed, he said.
"We have an inadequate amount of grass seeds," Mnene added.
Experts promote the growth of indigenous grass, which wards off desertification and guarantees livestock security, but only a quarter of participating farmers in Kenya's southern dry lands were given seeds.
Each was allotted a mere 50kg, resulting in five acres of pasture, although most Kenyans tend plots of more than 100 acres, Wekesa said. - Sapa-AFP
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