PITCH is an innovative system for community-based rainwater harvesting, designed
to help the more than one billion people globally without access to clean water.
PITCH:AFRICA is centered around a street soccer venue that is built to capture and store rainwater as it falls onto the playing field and surrounding seating areas. The stored water is then filtered and made available to the community on a continuous basis to use for drinking, cooking, washing and/or farming.
PITCH:AFRICA also utilizes the spaces underneath the soccer field's bleachers to house schools, health clinics, community meeting rooms and a local market. PITCH is a sustainable and cost-effective alternative or complement to efforts currently under way like borehole drilling for water wells. Unlike rainwater harvesting, however, these water wells often dry up and are unable to provide a continuous water supply like PITCH.
In a typical rainy season in tropical and temperate Africa, it can rain anywhere from three to six feet. In areas of Africa with five feet of rain annually, one PITCH can capture as much as 1.8 million liters of water that would otherwise be lost. This is enough water to meet the daily drinking water needs - five liters - of 1,000 people every day for a full year.
How PITCH:AFRICA works
PITCH:AFRICA is a low-cost structure in the form of a soccer field that uses simple science to provide regularly available water for drinking, washing, cooking and/or the irrigation of crops. As rainwater falls on the soccer field and surrounding seating areas, it passes through a semi-permeable membrane that captures the water and stores it beneath the soccer field in cisterns. When the water is ready to be used, it undergoes a filtration process before being distributed to the community. This ensures that clean water is available on a continuous basis.
PITCH is designed so that it can be built using components and local materials that are readily available and/or reusable to minimize the cost and maximize its investment and impact. These components or materials used to build PITCH may vary from region to region - or even community to community. For example, abandoned shipping containers, which litter the African landscape, can be used as cisterns to capture and store the rainwater. Harvesting hoods can then be attached to these shipping containers to distribute the water. In other areas where shipping containers are not available or cost effective, cisterns to capture and store rainwater can be designed and constructed using local materials and built in varying sizes based on the community's needs.
Why PITCH works in Africa
In much of the African continent, rainfall can total between three to six feet per year. This is more rainfall than some countries in Northern Europe. However, because the rainfall is concentrated in short periods of time, much of this water evaporates and is lost. Today, women and children walk long distances - up to 40km a day - to get water that is often contaminated with disease that is easily spread. These long journeys also keep girls out of school, and their mothers unable to care for their families or earn an income. Rainwater can be harvested anywhere that it rains.
PITCH:AFRICA will provide clean water on a regular basis in tropical and temperate regions where water is scarce or unavailable, potentially making a profound difference in the lives of the people of Africa.
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