Clean water
February 22, 2012
Gaba Beach sounds just like a holiday resort, but the green color of the water destroys this image quickly. Plastic bags and bottles are floating on the water's surface and fish entrails drifting from a nearby landing make the place stink.
This is where the boat tour to visit the source of drinking water in Kampala, Uganda begins. About two kilometers (1.2 miles) from that spot, Paddy Twesigye, a senior project manager at the National Water and Sewerage Cooperation (NWSC) tells the boat driver to stop. He points to Nakivubo Channel, the main drainage for Kampala, which carries untreated sewage into the lake. The city's water works are located three kilometers from here.
The Gaba II and Gaba III water plants supply 160 million liters per day, meeting just half of Kampala's total drinking water needs. Cleaning sewage water is expensive. Apart from the scarcity of clean drinking water, the other big challenge is the high volume of sewage from slums that drains into the lake.
NWSC and the German KFW development bank are trying to change that. They provided slums with a prepaid water system. This includes public toilets that can be used for a small fee equivalent to 0.06 euros ($0.08), as well as communal facilities for families known as yards toilets.
"It has helped us a lot, because we used to get a lot of diseases, [such as] cholera," said Mariam Kasigwa, a landlady whose home received a yard toilets. They had been using pit latrines and in rainy seasons the residents were left with overflowing toilets. The sewage would then seep into Lake Victoria.
Public toilets are not enough
For some the public toilets are simply too expensive to use. Instead, they rely on what they call "flying toilets" - they put their feces in plastic bags and throw them out for garbage disposal. Opio Grace lives in a slum area called Kisenyi. More than 200 people live here and one has to step through piles of trash just to get around.
"We don't want to live in a dirty place. The problem is that we can stay for almost three months without seeing a garbage truck," Grace said.
Collecting rubbish is the responsibility of the Kampala City Council (KCC). NWSC's Twesigye admits that most of it doesn't get properly collected at all.
"Solid waste is a big problem. It is thrown into the channels. Thirty percent of the material is collected and the rest nobody knows. But most of it ends up in a channel. Then it pollutes the lake where we get water," he said.
Uganda's Minister for Water and Environment, Betty Bigombe, plans to introduce an awareness program to prevent people from throwing their trash into the lake. And she's looking beyond Lake Victoria to other potential water sources.
"We have Lake Kyoga, which is a huge source. We have a number of lakes that surround Kampala that could be tapped," she said, adding that they had to "start looking at other sources as opposed to relying on Lake Victoria."
Author: Asumpta Lattus / sst
Editor: Holly Fox