evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice Imported

Sand Dams for Drought-Season Water Security — Shashe Catchment, Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe · Gwanda · See the Zimbabwe profile

Evidence: Quasi-experimental Top 76% 33/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Twenty sand dams built by Zimbabwe's Dabane Trust in the semi-arid Shashe catchment gave 19 villages water for 4.4 more months a year on average (3.9 in a drought year) and ~58 extra litres/day, per a 2024 IWMI peer-reviewed evaluation.

4.4 months
Additional months of water availability per year
3.9 months
Additional months of water availability in drought year
~58 litres/day
Additional household water collected per day
20
Sand dams assessed
19
Villages served
Sand Dams for Drought-Season Water Security — Shashe Catchment, Zimbabwe

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Dabane Trust, in partnership with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI)
Period
2022–2024
Keywords
water storage, drought resilience, rural water security, WASH

Context

Zimbabwe's semi-arid Shashe catchment (Matabeleland South) lacks reliable dry-season water; the NGO Dabane Trust has built sand dams — low masonry/rock-and-concrete barriers across seasonal sand rivers — to give rural communities dry-season water access.

Activities

Dabane Trust built 20 sand dams used by 19 villages in the Zimbabwean part of the Shashe catchment; a 2024 peer-reviewed evaluation by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), conducted with Dabane Trust under the NEXUS Gains initiative, assessed the dams' contribution to water security.

Results

The evaluation found water available at dam sites for an average of 4.4 additional months per year compared with unmodified riverbeds (3.9 additional months in a drought year), and an average increase of about 58 litres of household water collected per day.

Conclusions

The same technique, pioneered at larger scale in Kenya's Kitui, Machakos and Makueni counties, has independently documented reductions in water-collection time from over three hours to as little as 15 minutes per trip, suggesting the Zimbabwe results are consistent with a wider, transferable evidence base, though the Shashe evaluation itself relied on a mixed methodology of dam-site observation and community self-reported survey data.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Medium (1–3 years)
Staffing & skills
Dabane Trust field teams, International Water Management Institute (IWMI) researchers

Conditions for success

  • Located on seasonal sand rivers where sand can trap and store water shielded from evaporation
  • Combined with community-level water-collection monitoring (dam-site observation + household surveys)

Commonly funded by

Philanthropic / foundation funding

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Replication kit

Reusable artefacts from this practice — as published by their sources.

Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

Similar practices you may find useful