Uganda 1 – Water Benders

Overview

Lake Bunyonyi, located in Southwestern Uganda, is situated below a vast expanse of hilly terrain. Climate change has made rainfall patterns in the area incredibly unpredictable and thus unreliable for farmers whose livelihood depends on their crops, the variability of rainfall is shown in the following image. This project is sponsored by the Global Livingston Institute (GLI), a non-profit organization whose goal is to educate students and community leaders on innovative approaches to international development and empower awareness, collaboration, conversations, and personal growth. In order to help solve the problem of unreliable rainfall, GLI has tasked our team with designing an irrigation system for the farmers of the Lake Bunyonyi community. The main constraints for this project are the cost of the design, lack of resources such as electricity or fuel in the area, the accessibility of materials, constructability, the amount of maintenance required, and the ability to serve the greatest number of community members. After learning that the majority of the community members live higher than 15 meters in elevation from Lake Bunyonyi, it became apparent that the use of a human or solar-powered pump would not be applicable for the bulk of the community due to the limited output of these pumps. To serve as much of the community as possible, our team collaborated with another senior design team, Uganda 2, to discuss the possibility of creating different design solutions for community members living at different proximities to the lake. This idea was well-received by GLI, and our team elected to take the challenge of creating a design solution for community members living above 15 meters in elevation from Lake Bunyonyi, outside the range of the proposed pump solutions. Therefore, based on the given design constraints and inability to effectively use the lake water the team decided to transition into designing a rainwater catchment system. After analyzing rainfall and crop data and learning that the terrain begins to flatten higher in the hills, the use of a water storage tank was then designed to work in tandem with farmers’ roofs. A gutter will be fastened onto farmers’ roofs which will guide water into a nearby tank. As this rainwater catchment system utilizes available materials and is relatively low-cost, the team selected this as the final design. This will make water more easily accessible for farmers located up on the nearby hills during the dry seasons. The rainwater catchment solution that our team has designed will allow future engineers working on the project to refine and begin its implementation. As a next step for a future team, An operations and maintenance manual will need to be made to educate farmers and community leaders on how to use and upkeep this system. 

At the start of this project, the team was excited to learn about the community and determine how best to fix its current water shortage problem. Communication was crucial to this project due to the large amount of information needed to design the solution in a foreign country and understand the local needs. During the meetings, questions were asked by team members about project-specific information, however, there were equally important questions asked to find out more information about how the client initially got involved with this community and their efforts to make this world a better place. The team was also fortunate to talk to a local engineer during a meeting which allowed us to get some more context of how engineering projects are run and built. Once solutions were drawn up based on feedback, research, and calculations, the team used decision matrices. These matrices allowed the team to dive deeper one solution at a time and find its weaknesses on construction, use and meeting the project problem to better design them later. This also allowed the client to understand what we believe was the best solution based on the teams’ assumptions. As a team, we decided to propose an array of solutions to the client because we didn’t know how the community was going to react to our initial designs. By doing this, the team was able to create a survey for the community to take and give us feedback on what solution they think they would use and best fit their needs. The information the team gathered from these surveys heavily influenced our final solution design.  

Once solutions were narrowed down to a couple of designs. Risk matrices were performed, exploring the environmental impact, human safety, and potential failure modes of the solutions. As a team, we made it a priority to make sure that the proposed design solution was safe in all aspects.  Additionally, the team explored how sustainable the solutions were in terms of using local materials, lasting more than 5 years, and the need for repairs or redesigns once constructed. As current Mines’s students and engineers in training, our brainstorm sessions were based on the knowledge we have collected throughout the range of classes we have taken and advice from our project advisors and technical advisors.

Working in a developing country across the globe was the hardest part of this project due to not being able to see what it is like. One of the biggest constraints the team and client agreed upon in the initial phases was to maintain a low project budget. Every time a solution was designed or redesigned, a project material analysis was performed outlining the cost of materials with local prices, so the team was aware of where the solution stood at meeting this goal. Overall, our approach to this problem was not settling for our first solution but to strive to find the best solution that the community would implement immediately and impact for the greater good.