Status of Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) in Ghana COLLINS ANDOH 1 , SAKSHI GUPTA 2 * and DEEPAK KHARE 1 1 Water Resources Department and Management Department, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee, India. 2 Department of Civil Engineering, Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India. Abstract Potable water accessibility is an important criteria for improving health assessment of mankind. The demand for potable water in the world is growing fast compared to the growth in population. The increasing water demand globally has resulted into looking for alternative mechanism for water supply. Globally, harvesting of rainwater is classified as one of the best interventions to address water scarcity situations . In most of the developing countries including Ghana, rural communities lack the accessibility to clean drinking water. This paper presents rainwater harvesting as an alternative water supply system that needs to be adopted by the people of Ghana and is based on literatures associated with rainwater harvesting obtained from various studies both locally and internationally. This paper has identified the affordability and user ownership as the main factors influencing rainwater harvesting practices by rural communities in Ghana. Poor roofing materials, inappropriate harvesting facilities, housing occupancy, inaccurate land boundaries, quality of water and uneven rainfall pattern have been outlined as the constraining bottlenecks to this practice. Measures to curtail have been discussed as well. Moreover, a simple affordable rapid sand filter needs to be evolved and incorporated into the system in Ghana. Current World Environment Journal Website: www.cwejournal.org ISSN: 0973-4929, Vol. 13, No. (1) 2018, Pg. 172-179 CONTACT Sakshi Gupta sakshilibran@gmail.com Department of Civil Engineering, Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India. © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Enviro Research Publishers This is an Open Access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted NonCommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.12944/CWE.13.1.17 Article History Received: 04 September 2017 Accepted: 19 March 2018 Keywords Rainwater harvesting (RWH), Rural water supply, Water demand, Potable water, Water scarcity, Ghana. Introduction Undeniably, all water resources be it a surface water source or groundwater, originates from rainfall and constitute the main sources of water for domestic, industrial and agricultural usage. Water scarcity and pollution problems have generated public discussions and concerns by both policy makers and researchers. This has led to several studies on the quality of groundwater and surface water in Ghana using conventional methods 1 .Projections from United Nations, 2014, reveals that about 1.8 billion people of the world's population would be facing water availability problems by 2025. Increasing growth of populations, industrialization, intense irrigation coupled with global climate change is putting much pressure on available sources of water 2 .