Waterbank School Campus: Harvesting Rain and Resilience, Laikipia (Central Highlands), Kenya

A Living Machine for the Community

Worldwide, billions of people live without access to clean drinking water, even in regions that receive substantial annual rainfall. PITCHAfrica identified this not just as a health crisis, but as a design failure.

Taking cues from Buckminster Fuller’s "Design Science" philosophy, doing more with less, the Waterbank project reframes the architectural question. Instead of merely designing a shelter, the architects designed a building that actively solves problems. By seamlessly integrating water catchment, storage, and filtration into the school's structure, the campus becomes a hub for community training, conservation agriculture, and social stabilization.

The Vision: Erasing the Burden of Water

The social implications of this design are just as profound as the environmental ones.

• Empowering Women and Girls: Fetching water is traditionally a grueling, time-consuming burden placed on women and girls, often preventing them from attending school. By making clean water available directly at the school, this architectural intervention removes that burden, causing school attendance to soar to as high as 95%.

• Football as a Catalyst: The centerpiece of the campus is PITCHKenya, a 1,500-seat 5-a-side football and volleyball stadium that houses classrooms and an environmental education center beneath its seating. Sponsored by the Samuel Eto’o Foundation, it uses the passion for sports to unite the community while the structure itself harvests 1.5 million liters of rain annually.

Tectonics: The Waterbank Typology

The brilliance of the design lies in taking a common, low-cost architectural form and fine-tuning it to perform a vital ecological service.

• The Catchment Roof: The expansive roofs of the campus buildings act as giant funnels. Rainwater is harvested across the corrugated surfaces and directed safely inward rather than washing away into the dirt.

• Central Cisterns and Filtration: The water is channeled directly into massive, centrally located storage cisterns equipped with simple, highly effective ceramic filtration systems, ensuring the water is instantly safe for drinking.

• Inward-Facing Courtyards: The classrooms are strategically positioned to face inward toward the rainwater-harvesting courtyards. These protected central spaces are utilized for conservation agriculture, allowing students to grow healthy food right outside their doors.

The Living Building: A Replicable Oasis

The campus proves that innovative design does not require high-tech materials.

• A Patchwork of Prototypes: The campus is made up of four unique, low-cost building types developed by PITCHAfrica: the Waterbank School, Dormitories, Canteens, and Latrines.

• Self-Reliance: By providing year-round clean drinking water and agricultural irrigation in a semi-arid region, the architecture supports the community in becoming entirely self-reliant, effectively building peace and preventing water-based conflicts in the region.

Data Sheet

• Project: Waterbank Secondary School Campus

• Location: Laikipia, Kenya

• Architect: PITCHAfrica (Jane Harrison)

• Completion Year: 2012 (First School) / 2014 (Campus)

• Performance: Harvests over 2 million liters of water annually

• Key Components: Rain-harvesting roof systems, central cisterns, ceramic filtration, conservation agriculture courtyards

• Typology: Education / Water Infrastructure / Sports Arena

• Client: Zeitz Foundation / Local Community (Sponsored by Samuel Eto'o Foundation)