Challenges And Prospects For Effective Water Conservation In Mwingi North District, Kitui County, Kenya

ABSTRACT

Water conservation involves the strategies and activities that are used to manage water resources, especially fresh water as a sustainable resource. Conservation aims at protecting the water environment and its resources from negative impacts in order to make them to be able to meet current and future demands, making them sustainable. Water is faced with a lot of challenges from human demand, this including the population, household size and growth. Environmental challenges include climate change and environmental degradation.

Water is a basic necessity to human survival. With the current environment, due to climate change and degradation, water has been a challenge to the community especially those living in the ASAL areas. These challenges affect the community negatively in all sectors, economically, socially and politically. Without water the community and country’s development is affected. Efforts to conserve and protect water are also affected as the resources become scarce and hence survivals for the fittest tactics are employed, thus implementing the measures of conservation is affected. This project is aimed at providing and coming up with the challenges that face water conservation in Mwingi constituency in Kitui County.

Chapter one helps to discuss the problem as it is in the region and the world. It gives the problem statement, justification and significance of the study. Research questions, objectives and premises are also raised. The objectives are clearly identified to help and guide this study. In chapter two, literature from different scholars is used to further define the problem of the study. This helps to know the contribution made by scholars and researchers in the issue of challenges facing water conservation in the world and other regions. It focuses in water conservation and the challenge of implementing it globally, regionally and locally. The third chapter helps use to get familiar with the study area, defining the area in terms of its physical, economic and social set up. The fourth chapter helps us to identify the research design that is used in the study. The nature and sources of data and the data collection instruments are discussed in this chapter. In chapter five, it deals with analyzing the data collected. Data analysis was based on the information obtained from questionnaires, interviews with the government offices and household information, personal observations and the interviews from the people in the area. Household characteristics such as household size, income and water conservation practices where analyzed.