Kipkimba Water Project – Nandi Tea Estate

Kipkimba is an area in Kenya where lots of tea is grown, including green leaf tea which is supplied to Nandi Tea Estates Limited and then bought by Taylors to create some of our Yorkshire Tea blends.

Unfortunately, Kipkimba does not have the infrastructure to supply the community with water, so the people who live in the area have to walk quite a distance to collect water for themselves. It’s a long journey – carrying it up from the water supply at the base of Kipkimba’s hills back to homes and livestock, which can take a lot of time and energy. As fetching water is mainly seen as the responsibility of women and children, they have less time available for earning an income or attending school.

Taylors and Nandi Tea Estates have been working on value chain investment projects together since 2013, from the construction of a classroom for children moving up from nursery to primary school, to a previous water project in Sosiot between 2014 and 2018. 

We have continued to collaborate with them by investing into improving the infrastructure in the Kipkimba area so that water can be supplied directly to the community. We supported the Kipkimba water project with multiyear project funding, which took place in 2019, 2021 and 2022. This allowed Nandi to plan longer term as the water projects are complex and take a lot of time and investment. 

The project aims to benefit the small holder tea farmers and communities living in the Kipkimba region, which is roughly around 1350 households equating to 8000 people.

The project included:

  • Building a water catchment reservoir with a holding capacity to sustainably supply water to the area. This will enrich the catchment area with indigenous forest cover to enhance flow of streams.
  • Building and laying pipelines to connect the main catchment to the reservoir tanks.
  • Building and equipping a pump house.
  • Providing electricity connection through linking to the power supply as well as installing solar panels for a backup power supply.

Nandi Tea Estate

The project will result in access to clean water for those living and working in the Kipkimba region and this will hopefully lead to women and children spending less time collecting water and more time earning an income and attending school. In addition, farmers will also have improved access to water for their livestock, which should decrease soil erosion caused by livestock being driven down the stream to the water point.

We hope that the project will also have a positive impact on the supply chain as workers will be able to drink potable water in their homes rather than having to walk long distances to collect water and this will leave them with more time and energy to participate in other productive activities, such as working on the tea estates. In addition, the water can also be used to grow vegetables in the farmers homes, improving nutrition and food security in the local community and creating a further income stream for them and their families.

We have agreed a further water project for 2023 – the Kaptien water project. This is the final community in the Nandi hills area that has been without water and we will be joining with both Nandi and Infré, who decaffeinate the tea for us, to fund this third water project, giving water to the entire Nandi Hills area.