The private sector has been urged to support the Upper Tana Nairobi Water Fund Trust to raise a Ksh 500 million endowment fund to conserve the water tower that supplies Nairobi with the commodity.

The fund has so far raised Ksh 220 million, and will require an additional Ksh 280 million from which to draw and keep undertaking the conservation project.

The disclosure was made last week during a breakfast event co-hosted by UTNWFT – a conservation charitable trust and the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) to enlighten business leaders about the risk.

The event, which was presided over by Environment and Forestry Principal Secretary Chris Kiptoo, brought together business leaders of listed companies, fund managers, institutional investors, and stockbrokers.
Over 90 per cent of water consumed in the city and 65 per cent in hydropower production comes from the Upper Tana basin.

The trust’s president Eddy Njoroge reckoned that unsustainable farming practises by farmers in the Upper Tana catchment basin, coupled with climate change, population growth and increased industrial demand are threatening the sustainable supply of water to the city- drawing parallels with Cape Town, South Africa, whose taps almost ran dry in 2018.

“Using nature-based solutions, we can secure enough water for the city in perpetuity while improving the livelihoods of the farmers through activities on their farms,” he said.

To sustain the conservation work, Njoroge added, corporate leaders need to better understand how the water fund model connects the work of the farmers upstream and availability of water for their operations and customers downstream through payment for ecosystem services.