Case study of
#00058 Coastal fog harvesting with mesh collectors where advection fog is reliable
Aït Baamrane, Sidi Ifni, Morocco
#00050
Implementer
Dar Si Hmad (women-led NGO); FogQuest (pilot design); CloudFisher / Aqualonis / WasserStiftung (mesh upgrade)
Timeline
Since Mar 1, 2015
Location
Description
A women-led NGO (Dar Si Hmad) built the world's largest operational fog-water harvesting system on the fog-rich slopes of Mount Boutmezguida, on the edge of the Sahara, where groundwater is failing under drought. Vertical mesh nets strain droplets from advection fog into reservoirs, gravity-fed and piped to scattered Berber villages, with distribution metered via prepaid SMS-linked meters. Expanded slowly and deliberately to build community ownership; later upgraded to next-generation CloudFisher mesh (Aqualonis/WasserStiftung). Governance is women-led with embedded capacity-building, which analysts identify as the primary reason the system has remained operational where similar projects collapsed.
Metrics
4Funding
Lessons learned
- The decisive factor was social, not technical: slow expansion, community ownership, women-led governance and on-site capacity-building are what prevented the maintenance/ownership collapse that has ended similar projects elsewhere.
- Topography directly sets the economics — villages too far from the collectors or too small to justify piping infrastructure were excluded, which created inter-village tension that implementers had to actively manage.
Documented Jun 7, 2026