25th November 2024
By, Isaac Senabulya.
Members of parliament have called for increased focus on access of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services for the elderly and Persons with disabilities ahead of the inaugural Annual WASH Symposium, slated for November 28, 2024 at Butaleja Boma Grounds.
Leading the call was kiboga district woman mp Christine Nakimwelo , during Press Briefing at Parliament, where she decried the poor access of sanitation and hygiene facilities, that were found not to be user friendly for these vulnerable groups.
“We may think that we have toilets and pit latrines in our households but are they user friendly for the elderly that make up 5.5% of Uganda’s population? So if you say you have a pit latrine, I have news for you because that latrine may not be user friendly for the elderly. So we all need to come out and see how we can build toilets and latrines that are user friendly for the elderly because the majority of these are in rural areas. So we need to look at that population and see if the hygiene and sanitation we are talking about is accessible to this group,” said Kaaya.
Nakimwelo, who doubles as Shadow Minister for Water and Environment also called for the improvement of sanitation and hygiene services in schools in order to reduce the high school dropout rates among girls, who are forced to abandon studies due to lack of water and latrines to use, during their menstrual cycle.
She noted, “There is also need to provide sanitation and hygiene services for the girl child in order to help keep them in school because data has shown that 10% of the girls that drop out of schools because the WASH services in schools are insufficient. There is no water in schools, they share the toilets with the boys prompting the girls to drop out of school. If a child is away from school for five days, and returns to school, they lose morale when they look at all the lessons they missed at the time they were away.”
While presenting results from studies conducted on WASH services in Uganda to the MPs of the Parliamentary Forum on WASH , Marie Nanyanzi, Senior Program Officer, Twaweza East Africa revealed that 2 out of 10 households access drinking water from unsafe source and this gets worse in the rural areas where 24% households collect their drinking water either from a surface source that is a river or a dam.
“Generally, this doesn’t shed a very bright picture because even when we look at the piped water, we see that overall, only 19% of Ugandans have access to drinking water that is from a piped source and this 19% is largely in the urban locations meaning that there is need to deeply think about pushing piped water sources to the rural locations,” explained Nanyanzi.
According to Tweweza, most Ugandans use a pit latrine with a slab as their toilet facility. However, there 11% households that have a pit latrine that doesn’t have a washable slab.
Nanyanzi added, “And here we are talking of a pit latrine that has a log as the barrier between you the user and the feacal matter. The data we have shows that it is 3% of Ugandans that have flash toilets, but again, most of these are in the Urban and largely, greater Kampala. 43% of the households in Uganda say that they have water near the latrine and then, 34% say that they have soap near the latrine.”
Obongi County mp George Bokha called for the need to improve access to WASH services in order to reduce the disease burden if Uganda is to move towards the realization of its aspirations, of having Universal coverage of access to water and sanitation hygiene products and services.
He said, “As a country, if we look at the burden of disease that we are grappling with, close to 75% of the diseases are water and sanitation related. Cholera, typhoid fever and a number of diseases are driven by water and sanitation scarcity. And hence, the need for us, as we build up to the 2024 WASH symposium, reflect on and solicit for insights from various stakeholders on what we need to do as a country, to put in place appropriate policy to achieve universal coverage for water, sanitation and hygiene as enshrined in the sustainable development goals 6, as we achieve to attain Sustainable Development Goal 3, health and wellbeing for all.”
Butaleja district woman mp ,Florance Nebanda welcomed the decision to host the WASH Symposium in Butaleja saying that the event is intended to create multi-sector platform to discuss critical issues, challenges and also to promote a policy driven dialogue to help Ugandans come together and look for solutions towards poor access to WASH services in the country.
“Butaleja is disadvantaged because we are in the low land and 80% of the coverage, we are in the wetland so of course we have challenges of water, both during the dry and wet seasons. As we speak now, it is a rainy season, the floods from our neighbours the Bugisu region are flooding towards Butaleja and we are at the receiving end, this engagement will help us to see how we can co-exist amidst the challenge to make sure that we put water that is causing floods in our districts ti good use,” said Nebanda.
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