Challenges
Clean Water and Sanitation
Uganda is blessed with an abundance of water. Eighteen percent of Uganda’s surface is a river, lake or wetland. For centuries this has provided clean water for human consumption, for cultivating food and cash crops, supporting healthy forests and grasslands, ensuring abundant wildlife, and making possible vibrant towns, cities, and industries.
However, in recent decades, dramatic population and economic growth – and failed government leadership – have severely degraded and squandered this precious resource. Mismanaged growth in both rural and urban areas has overwhelmed what systems are in place to provide clean water, solid waste management and sanitary sewerage. Moreover, there are few signs that this will improve as growth continues.
Government Has Failed
At the heart of these problems is the failure of government to carry out its obligations to ensure a healthy Uganda.
These failures include allowing large and small-scale industrial pollution, ignoring unchecked urban stormwater runoff, inadequate municipal water, sewerage and solid waste management, preventing unsanitary household practices, clear-cutting forests for corporate farming and industrial projects, illegal mining and sloppy mining practices, wetlands encroachment, and disrupting our magnificent rivers with counter-productive hydroelectric dams.
The collapsing health of Lake Victoria is our biggest shame – as industrial and urban pollutants spread further into its waters to harm life-sustaining fisheries and wildlife – and misguided engineering on the Nile River drains the lake unsustainably. Because of excessive flows at the two hydroelectric dams, Lake Victoria lost three percent of its volume of water between 2006 and 2009. The decline in fish species in the lake, the United Nations reported in 2010, “is considered to be the largest documented loss of biodiversity ever inflicted on an ecosystem by humankind.”
Also shameful is the government’s disregard for the health and function of the Nile River, so central to the lives of millions of Ugandans. Its failure to protect the wetlands and forests, lakes and tributaries along the Nile has degraded its water quality significantly. The single-minded program to build more hydropower dams on the Nile, as well, is seriously compromising the Nile’s ability to sustain life along its course.
Impact on Humans
But where unsanitary water and human consumption intersects is our greatest crisis – by carrying preventable diseases to vulnerable children and the elderly – stalling progress made in the last century to help Ugandans lead longer, healthier, more productive lives. It is also a special burden for women. Throughout Uganda, women typically fetch and manage water for household use and, in caring for their children, see firsthand the effects of waterborne diseases.
Solving our clean water and sanitation problems could become Uganda’s most important economic development boost – yet today it is one of our government’s lowest priorities.
Despite signing in 2000 the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, the government of Uganda has made little progress to achieve Target 7C, which states:
Target 7C: Halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation:
Proportion of population with sustainable access to an improved water source, urban and rural
Proportion of urban population with access to improved sanitation
Dishonest Reporting
Government water management officials reported to the UN they had made strong progress and were “on track” to meet these targets by 2015. However, the more reliable Uganda Demographic and Health Survey (UDHS) of 2006 found the contrary – only 21 percent of urban residents and nine percent of rural residents had access to improved sanitation.
In compiling their glowing self-assessment, the water management officials simply ignored standard definitions of “improved water source” and “improved sanitation.” For example, the World Health Organization defines “improved sanitation” as toilets connected to public sewer or septic systems, ventilated pit latrines or pit latrine with a slab – definitions that lead to Uganda’s low success rates. What do not qualify are public or shared latrines, open pit latrines or bucket latrines.
Or as WaterAid International put it, “Official statistics tend to understate the extent of water and sanitation problems, sometimes by a large factor. There are not sufficient resources available for accurate monitoring of either population or coverage. Varying definitions of water and sanitation coverage are used and national figures mask large regional differences in coverage.”
All Talk, No Budget
What such dishonest government reporting cannot hide, however, are the shameful budget cuts to such programs and the tragic health impacts of unsanitary water.
While increasing spending for such areas as the military, government has been cutting Uganda’s water and sanitation budget, which has fallen steadily since 2006 as a share of gross domestic product – down from 0.84 percent of GDP to 0.57 percent. Uganda’s national budget for water and sanitation in 2011 – 237 billion shillings, or about US$83 million – amounts to only US$2.41 per Ugandan. This mocks our constitution, which declares the right to “clean and safe water.”
Revenues from water system users could easily finance many improvements, but the National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) collected nothing in 2008 for fully one-third of the water it supplies because of leakage, illegal connections or simple nonpayment. That is better than 1998, when it collected for only half what it supplied – but much of the improvement was due to a new government policy to pay the delinquent bills of public entities.
Failure to Treat Sewage
Wastewater treatment systems are even more inadequate, reflecting inadequate budgets. Only two cities, Kampala and Masaka, have NWSC sewage plants. These provide primary and secondary treatment – only partly effective, even when working well (which they don’t). They then discharge the remaining polluted water into wetlands or directly into the nearest water body, such as Lake Victoria – the source of Kampala’s drinking water. This is unacceptable in modern society.
In 21 towns, the NWSC provides wastewater stabilization ponds, essentially settling ponds, in which solids dissolve or settle to the bottom, while sunlight and warm temperatures remove other pollutants. However, efficient maintenance and operations are lacking, and analyses show the systems mostly fail – discharging contaminants into water bodies from which the same communities draw their drinking water.
Too Many Children Die
Uganda’s official neglect of water and sanitation has tragic, unnecessary consequences, especially for children. Uganda’s infant mortality rate is 76 per 1,000 live births – one in 13 of our children do not survive the first year of life, according to the UDHS. The under-five mortality rate is 137 per 1,000 – one of every seven Ugandan children dies before reaching his or her fifth birthday.
Published data in the Lancet medical journal in 2010 revealed that diarrhoea – caused by drinking filthy water – is now the biggest killer of children under five in Africa, surpassing pneumonia. In Uganda, 29,400 children die from diarrhoea annually, according to UNICEF. The 2006 UDHS survey questioners found that one-fourth of Ugandan children under five had experienced diarrhoea in the previous two weeks [emphasis ours].
Lack of progress in water and sanitation is surely also a factor in Uganda’s adult mortality rates, which the UDHS found were essentially unchanged in the 15 years before its 2006 survey. As population increases, we can expect the health impacts of this problem to increase at least at the same rate, if not higher.
Solutions are Simple
The solution to preventing these deaths and diseases is simple. Just having a sanitary toilet and using it regularly can reduce the incidence of diarrhoea by 40 percent, while a toilet together with safe water and hygiene can reduce the disease by 90 percent – and reduce child mortality by half, according to the World Health Organization. This alone should trigger an all-out government clean water and sanitation infrastructure campaign.
The need is urgent for Uganda to protect our water from further degradation – and build the infrastructure need for clean water and sanitation for all. Only by adopting truly sustainable national policies can we ensure abundant, clean water for our future prosperity. This is all the more urgent as we face the growing threat of global climate change that is disrupting historic patterns of rainfall and temperatures.
To read documents about water and sanitation, click here for Library.
To read more about NAPE’s action agenda, click here.
