Uganda has made commendable strides in the provision of sanitation facilities. However, the statistics show that there’s still a lot of ground to make up. For the country to register progress at a faster rate, MARTHA NAIGAGA, the sanitation coordinator at the ministry of water and environment, tells Benon Herbert Oluka that every Uganda must start to take the initiative to improve sanitation within their households.
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What’s the general situation in Uganda in terms of sanitation and hygiene?
Sanitation and hygiene service in Uganda is not where we want it to be. It’s still a challenge. Many Ugandans are still facing a problem of lack of access to decent sanitation in their homes. But even in public places there’s also a dire situation. Currently, access to any form of sanitation in Uganda is at 79 per cent in rural areas. But the bulk of those facilities are actually not improved. They are basic. They are traditional and many of them don’t offer the health benefit of having a sanitation facility. They actually put the user at risk.
We also have a task of eliminating open defecation which is about 8 per cent so that those who were engaging in the practice are able enjoy the benefits of actually having sanitation facilities.
In government schools, currently the pupil to toilet stance ratio is about 71:1. That’s an average. In some schools it’s even worse. You find in some rural schools that a school can have just two stances for the entire school, including teachers so the condition is really bad.
In public places, it’s also not good. You find that many places lack facilities. Apart from Kampala where you have so many toilets in the arcades, in the park, in the streets, you can easily access, although at a cost, in other places, you cannot. Even in some health centres, there’s a challenge, so as a country we really have a big amount of work to do towards improving access to good, decent sanitation because we are in the SDG [Sustainable Development Goals] era and in this SDG era, it’s about leaving no one behind.
Hand washing, on the other side, we are even much lower. The current access is 36.5 per cent. You find that even in place like urban areas where there’s access to water, people don’t wash their hands. We have a national hand washing initiative as government, with our partners, just to air out and champion the cause on hygiene in this country. But as you can imagine, when we started with the campaign in 2007, we’ve been able to achieve some increment from those days when it was as low as 11 per cent, but it’s not yet where we want it. We want everybody to be washing their hands, everybody to be practising hygiene so that we interrupt the disease transmission cycle.
Are government departments speaking the same language on these issues and moving in the same direction as one family?
For sanitation, I must say there have been a lot of efforts. First of all, we are targeting universal access because even one family in this country is enough to pollute the country so even when we are at 99.9 per cent we won’t be comfortable. We want everybody to have a decent toilet all the time. That’s why we look at households, communities, and institutions.
Now, on the issue of coordination, sanitation is a very multi-stakeholder effort. We have the mother institution that is in charge of sanitation, which is the ministry of health, but it works together with all these other ministries. For example, for us we work in the ministry of water; because we supply water, we have a duty to make sure that the water is kept safe, that it’s not being contaminated. And you know when you supply water, you actually expect waste water. So there’s that aspect as well. There’s also the other one that is sewage so we have a stake in that as well as ministry of water.
And right now we are also housing the national hand washing initiative, which is made up of the ministries of education, water, health and our partners like UNICEF and UWASNET, the umbrella body that brings together all NGOs, so it’s a multi-stakeholder initiative that’s supposed to oversee and champion the hand washing campaign in this country. So that initiative is a coordinated effort to align the strategies, to align the messaging, to align the kind of direction that we want the campaign to take in this country.
But that initiative reports to a bigger body that coordinates sanitation in this country. It’s called the National Sanitation Working Group. That body is also multi-stakeholder, like I have told you the different people that are in government, in civil society organizations, donor agencies, and that kind of thing. So we coordinate sanitation at the national level. It acts also as a pressure group to sail through certain things on the agenda of the country to make sure that sanitation benefits from it. For example, some years back we did not have a budget line for sanitation in the ministry of finance so this Working Group kept pushing for that and it achieved it actually. So right now we have a budget line for sanitation. Because of that sanitation budget line that we have, we are able to send to the districts a conditional grant of around Shs2 billion per year; every district benefits between Shs21 million and Shs22m. It’s small but it’s something, given that we came from zero.
Equally so, at the district level, we have the water and sanitation coordination committees. Those ones also oversee and monitor water and sanitation activities in the districts. They meet and do joint monitoring. It’s made up also of very many departments that do sanitation; the education, community development, health, water, and the administration of course because the CAO chairs that committee. So in terms of coordination we are doing well.
Our biggest challenge is financing because, as I told you, our grant is small and it goes to all those districts. When the number of districts increases, they just sub-divide it further.
Are there districts that you could say are shining examples of service provision on water and sanitation matters?
We do have districts that are doing well. If you looked at our sector performance report, you will be able to fish them out. But largely many of them are in western Uganda, central Uganda, a bit of the East. Karamoja is doing badly but we must acknowledge that they have moved forward basing on the situation out of which they came. Sometime back they used to be as low as 2 per cent, some districts even 1 per cent. But they have moved. Even when you go to as low as 9 per cent, it’s a big step because they have been able to achieve 8 percentage points. But you find that there are other districts that have been at 96 per cent, they have stuck there for five years. So we must acknowledge even those ones that have moved from very low percentages, almost nothing. Even if they move and their percentages are still low, a lot of work has gone into that.
On the issue of public toilet facilities, people complain that you can drive from Mbarara district to Kampala city and there’s no public toilet facility. Is that something the public should expect soon?
We have a programme to address public sanitation for travellers. On the highways, like you rightly mentioned, there are no facilities in many places, and the ones that exist have been largely put in place by the private sector and they do it their style. I mean, someone has their money, they go and put up the facilities the way they want. If they want it to be only two stances, you can’t complain because it is their business, it’s what they can afford to do. So as government, we saw that that need is still persistent so we conducted a study to inform what kind of interventions we can do. Where can we locate these places? What other services need to compliment toilets to make them viable in the business sense. What else can we do? What kind of promotion do we need to do? What kind of technologies? And what management options do we have? The study was able to identify all that and we identified sites on all the six major highways in this country.
We are proposing a stopover that does not offer only sanitation. When somebody stops they should be able to stop for more than one reason. They can stop and eat and ease themselves and shop and even do mobile money transactions. Or just to refresh we’ve been having cases of road carnage where people drive and they get so tired and end up causing road accidents so we want that kind of stopover that will be able to achieve a multiple use.
We have plans of starting one this financial year. It will not be completed by the end of the financial year but we will start it. It’s a flagship project really which will be able to work as an example really for the rest. It is planned in Kiruhura district at what is commonly called the Kaguta road junction, although its name is actually Ibanda-Nyakahura road junction. We identified that and we have already gone a long way with the procurement of the contractor so we are about to start work on that. We have a bit of money for it but we know it is going to spill over so we shall plan again for it next year to be able to complete it. After that, we intend to include in our work plan for the next financial year several other facilities.
This is a project we are planning to do together with the districts because they must buy the land. So we have written to districts and told them of our intentions and the places that we think are suitable and we ask them to secure the land. But we are mindful that there are some private facilities in some districts so we don’t want to disenfranchise those ones. We want to locate the government ones in a reasonable distance to enable the other ones to continue to operate because they are business ventures and our role is not to kill business but rather to enhance it.
With time we shall be working together with those investors of the already existing facilities to improve their standards. We shall work it out may be in a public-private partnership kind of arrangement. We intend to attract private people to come and manage those facilities because we intend to keep them up and running, continuing to offer the service that we want them to offer, of the highest standards [to international level] so that even when tourists stop there, they are comfortable.
When we have covered the entire country, we will be able to enforce certain regulations and say because these facilities exist at this point and this point, we can compel people to stop and rest and make sure they do not park in the bush and go to defecate in the bush or mess up the environment.
You said districts will provide land. How much land are you looking at? And what kind of facilities will occupy that land?
Initially we are planning on a space of two acres but should we need more then we shall request for it. When we implement this project, we shall be able to learn and document and it will inform future designs. We shall be able to modify as we go along to continue responding to the needs of the users as they come in. We’ve done stakeholder engagements with the travellers, the bus operators, other ministries like works and tourism, tourist board, transporters’ association and several others so they are moving with us and we want to keep learning out of the process and improve it until we have reached a standard that is acceptable for everybody.
That complex is going to provide packing space, toilets, restaurant services, and a business centre. It’s going also to have attendants’ quarters because there must be attendants resident in that place and then a recreation place like a green area just for people to rest.
Finally, is there anything I have not asked directly that you would want to talk about?
As we struggle to reach a status that is good for all of us in terms of sanitation as a country, all of us have role to play. Government has a role but like I said the bulk of the role lies with the households. Government is going to do the bigger things like constructing sludge treatment sites, extending the sewerage network but if you are in a rural area and you need to construct a latrine you are going to do it yourself.
Our role as government is come in and sensitize you and tell you of the kind of latrine you can construct because of your area, may be because of the kind of geographic location you are in, and the kind of soil conditions.
