By Kenneth Kavulu
Kampala is filled with thousands of girls and women trying to survive on its streets, pushed to their wits’ end by the hardships and poverty in their rural areas. But even in the city, their lives are filled with challenges caused by poor living conditions in which they lack access to proper sanitation and water.
Hygiene management is a challenge to most of these girls and women. Twenty-four hours living on the streets, with some simply urinating on themselves and others looking for a hideout for a long call, simply create a disturbing picture of the life these people live.
In such conditions, it is hard for these women and girls to manage their menstrual hygiene without access to basic WASH services. In their bid to survive, the hygiene of the city is put at risk when they urinate and leave faecal material undisposed off properly.
It is unimaginable how these women and girls deal with their menstrual hygiene every month. As they also narrate that “they cry out for pads and knickers”. Street girls and women are on the streets begging for that daily meal for survival. They hardly get enough for their menstrual hygiene Kits.
It is difficult for a street girl to have access to clean water during the menstruation period to keep her body clean and safe. This aside, the girls require guidance on how to manage this monthly, and for a girl who has just started her menstrual cycle, there is no substantive help from anyone to manage it.
Akech is a 16-year-old street girl who has seen it all on the streets in her short life. She says, “It is difficult to access sanitary pads during menstruation periods and where I stay, the area has poor sanitation”.
According to Akech, reproductive tract infections caused by ignorance of personal hygiene are some of the main health challenges that she faces on the streets. She adds, “Sometimes I get infections when I use dirty dark corners or sit on toilets that are not good”.
This kind of situation is a common occurrence to many other girls on the street. To try avoiding infections, they only ease themselves on plastic bags, which they dispose in the night. Also, due to lack of access to clean and safe water to use for proper personal hygiene, they end up with a bad body odour, which results in neglect and isolation in the community because of their poor hygiene.
This simple illustrative story is just a sample of many others within Kampala. According to government estimates, as many as 15,000 children, girls and young women aged seven to 17 live on the streets in Kampala. These girls are either born on the streets or brought here by some relatives.
The COVID pandemic has worsened the situation. Now they cannot get a single coin to help them survive or even get a bottle of water to clean up. It is difficult for street girls and women to have access to safe sanitary products. Many resort to using pieces of cloth and toilet paper, which makes them uncomfortable.
In these conditions, women and girls have to ‘try and guard their backs’ to avoid cases of violence and that is when if they can. The streets are marred by violence sometimes from other streets children, older boys or also men.
These girls also find a challenge of sexual exploitation and abuse. Findings from the recent enumeration of street girls and women by RETRACK Uganda in collaboration with the Gender Ministry and the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) shows that more than 1,600 girls are living on streets aged 7-24 years while 1,410 children aged 7-17 years are estimated to be working on streets.
The site of young girls carrying children or walking about pregnant is what makes up the life of these young girls and women on the streets. Their stories are diverse and sad, tales of despair and misery and occasionally hope. Some of these young girls were trafficked to the city and others abandoned on streets while still, toddlers by their parents and have since beaten the odds to make ends meet.
In conclusion, the street girls and women spend most of their time and resources on searching for food and less or none at all on accessing sanitary products. Therefore, without any immediate intervention by organisations or government to provide information or Menstrual Hygiene Kits, this will continue to remain a challenge.
The Kampala Central Division Mayor, Charles Musoke Sserunjogi says, “I and my team have resolved to crack down on brothels in the city to mitigate acts of WASH, Menstruation management especially among adolescent girls and young women on streets of Kampala. And also we should find ways to provide waste sanitary products disposal gargets on streets and other menstrual kits”.
The writer Kenneth Kavulu is a Pan-African journalist, special feature TV producer and humanitarian show presenter show casing life in slums, He’s a local and international WASH Ton schouten award winner, member of communications, Advocacy and policy opportunities and outreach for poop Media (CAPOOP) and a journalist at Buganda Broadcasting services (BBS Terefayina)