The Bank-on-Rain mission is to create grassroots solutions for collecting rainwater for consumption and agriculture in developing areas of the planet.

Bank-on-Rain was conceived by Mike Williamson and me as we mentored a local startup business in the San Juan Islands. Rainbank is owned by entrepreneur Ken Blair, who to date has installed almost a quarter of million gallons of rainwater storage (with potable water filtration systems) since starting the business in 2006.

Mike Williamson is a serial innovator and inventor, and his company Williamson & Associates based in Seattle WA, is engaged in Marine Geophysics & Ocean Engineering. Mike was recently consulting in Rwanda at Lake Kivu, for an electric power project.

During this trip Mike sent me several images of the area, saying this was the perfect location for us to test our water system template (catchment & storage.) The area of Gisenyi is made up of many villages, some with as few as a dozen small houses, and all with shed-type metal roofs.

Mike said there were two reasons he thought a small village near Gisenyi would work well to prove the Bank-on-Rain “grass roots” solution: first, the rainfall in Gisenyi is about 32” per year, with two separate and distinct rainy seasons, equating to rainfall for a little over half the year. Secondly, he would be returning (politics allowing) with a half filled container, allowing space for about 12 or more catchment systems (24 totes) to travel with him to the Gisenyi area (the full half of the container having his own research equipment).

However, Mike said what got him the most excited was that collecting & storing rain for a good part of the year would allow the women who carry the water each day for household use, to go to school.

Additionally, a Bank-on-Rain collection and storage solution would provide far cleaner water than the village currently gets. The women in the particular village Mike selected, walk over three miles each way to collect dirty, polluted water from a natural water hole. Even though Rwanda appears quite agricultural, it is also very densely populated (9M people in 10,000 sq. mi. area, one of the highest population densities of any country in Africa), and the sheer numbers of people makes usable water a rapidly diminishing commodity.

The Bank-on-Rain solutions will focus on, but not be limited to, repurposing (recycling) existing products. We are doing small-scale tests of a couple of ideas, the first using locally sourced fish totes and a second using bulk food containers for rain collection & storage. Lucky for us, these are made of food-grade material.

Mike already uses fish totes for storing his marine test equipment on location, and a little research suggests there may be hundreds of thousands or more of the fish totes sitting unused around fishing industry locations worldwide, in no small part due to fishing fleets shrinking from lack of catch. So those pieces are just waiting to be repurposed for water storage in remote locations around the world? Add a few simple off-the-shelf pieces and you have a user friendly, workable basic rain storage system; easy to transport (the fish totes and food containers nest), easy to install, no power requirements, scalable, and viable wherever the rainfall is sufficient. This Bank-on-Rain solution can be flown into a remote airfield, and up to 12 totes stacked in a typical Mitsubishi-type pickup, and driven to the village.

We are in the beginning phase of formalizing Bank-on-Rain as a non-profit endeavor, researching several simple easy to implement solutions, and looking for partners whose goals align with ours. Please send me your ideas, comments and suggestions, on how you think we might proceed. I am passionate about designing green, but need all the help I can get.

Caroline Di Diego
www.inclinedesign.info
INCLINED TO DESIGN

Bank-on-Rain will be on twitter @BankonRain, and check out Bank-On-Rain.com for more images related to this post.