Dar Si Hmad's fog nets became a lifeline when the well-guardian women ran them

In the Amazigh towns of southwestern Morocco, wells were dry or slow to refill and rainfall was much lower than 25 years earlier. Women spent up to 3.5 hours a day fetching water from the nearest well; elderly women went thirsty because they gave water to children, elders and animals. Fog, meanwhile, was seen as a nuisance — a source of humidity, illness and excess moisture.

Dar Si Hmad, an organization serving vulnerable communities in southwestern Morocco, began working there in 2006, erecting fog nets whose mesh condenses droplets from the low clouds into containers. But the women were reluctant: as the wells' guardians and the community's water suppliers, they held status and autonomy, and putting the water 'in the community' meant taking some of that control away, recalls co-founder Jamila Bargach.

The fix was organizational rather than technical. Local men built and installed the nets, but the women decided how to collect, distribute and use the water, and were put in charge of tending the nets each day. The fog that had been a nuisance became 'a lifeline,' says Bargach: the water now supplies households, the local school and farming, and the recovered hours flow into work on olive fields.

The nets initially failed socially, not technically: the technology threatened the one group whose buy-in mattered most.

Well-hauling also carried social value — gatherings among women, teaching the younger generation — which a purely technical rollout ignores.

Handing women the operating role turned them from skeptical gatekeepers into owners, and the system spread beyond households to the school and farms.

Before installing new technology, map who holds status in the old system — then hand them the operator's role in the new one. Control, not charity, makes adoption stick.

Bargach says the nets have empowered the community's women, and similar fog-harvesting successes have followed in Namibia, Bolivia and Chile. With drought deepening — 'much less rainfall than 25 years ago' — the fog supply has only grown more valuable to the towns.