Addressing the sustainable development goals : roof harvested rainwater use in household & village agriculture for increased nutrition and education in developing nations : a case study of a Kenyan orphanage

![CDATA[Urban agriculture, and particularly what may be termed household agriculture and village agriculture, has considerable potential to contribute to household nutrition, education and general well-being. Food is essential for survival, as recognized in United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, No Hunger and goal 3, Health and Wellbeing. Competition over water resources between agricultural and domestic use highlights an important nexus with goal 6, clean water and sanitation. Household agriculture can contribute to at least 8 of the 17 goals. Often home gardens fail due to lack of water and it has been found that roof harvested rainwater can help mitigate this issue. In this paper we model rainwater harvesting and potential food producing using ERain, a daily climate data analysis tool. An established orphanage in Nakuru, Kenya that houses up to a maximum of 45 adults and 120 children is used for the study. A 1ML open reservoir with a rainwater inflow from a 1400m2 roof catchment, and additional recycled water inflow of 8KL per day is currently used for irrigation of a 240m2 greenhouse. Analyses showed that the irrigated greenhouse area could be increased eight times and still maintain 100% of water requirements. However if the recycled water is excluded, analysis indicates that the water requirements could currently only be met 74% of the time. If the reservoir was replaced with a closed tank to eliminate evaporation then a total of 500m2 of greenhouse area or open field could be supported. It is emphasized that this is a multi-disciplinary issue and that education is essential to successful implementation.]]