John Mbaria, Special Correspondent
21 March 2006
Nairobi — A community revolving fund in Kitale, Kenya, that has assisted hundreds of poor families with money to put up better sanitation, is among unique initiatives in East Africa hailed in a new United Nations global report.
Established by an NGO called Practical Action (formerly ITDG) and managed by the Catholic Diocese of Kitale, the fund operates in the Tuwani and Shimo la Tewa slums of the town. It offers loans of between Ksh27,000 ($342) and Ksh60,000 ($759) to plot owners, who repay at an annual rate of 12 per cent. This has benefited more than 230 families.
Also selected for special mention in the UN-Habitat report, Achieving Global Goals in Small Urban Centres: Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities (2006), is Uganda's 1997 water sector reform that has increased the involvement of the country's private sector in managing urban water supply.
The report says that, in 2001, local authorities in Uganda awarded management contracts to the local private sector in nine towns with populations ranging from 5,000 to 15,000 people. By 2003, the number of small towns contracting private operators had risen to 24 and the country was hoping to hand over water supply in all small towns to these operators by March, 2005. The reforms were financed by the African Development Bank.
Apart from this, Uganda contracted water supply in hundreds of villages with approximately 1,000 inhabitants each to small-scale private contractors between 1998 and 2001. Quoting Uganda's Ministry of Finance, the report says this led to "an impressive increase in coverage of approximately one million people." But the reforms are plagued by problems, especially because many of the companies contracted had little experience of construction projects while "some had even been formed purely in order to access the funding offered by the programme."
The situation of water supply and sanitation provision in Tanzania, however, has received less attention than in its two East African counterparts.
The only time the country is mentioned is in a section dealing with the water supply situation in small centres around Lake Victoria, where the report says that 90 per cent of the 244 shoreline settlements suffer from common epidemics of waterborne and other water-related diseases - cholera, typhoid and dysentery - due to low levels of sanitation coverage.
"Most of these centres are also experiencing unplanned, spontaneous growth combined with rundown and often non-existent basic infrastructure and services."
However, the report says that a project is underway to improve and extend provision of water, sanitation, drainage and solid waste management in 16 small urban centres of East Africa: five in Kenya, five in Uganda and six in Tanzania.
Globally, one billion people who lack basic water and sanitation services live in what the report calls "small urban centres or large villages with urban characteristics." Drawing from a survey conducted in 43 low and middle-income countries, it further says that a mere 40 per cent of the inhabitants of urban centres with less than 100,000 people use flush toilets.
The rest have to make do with pit latrines and other unhygienic systems that often lead to pollution of rivers, streams and lakes as well as ground water.
In most small urban centres of East Africa, the proportion of the population served by adequate supply of water and sanitation is pathetically low. For instance, with more than 17,000 inhabitants, Kumi Town in Uganda has only two public pit latrines, while most residents rely on kiosks and vendors for their water supply.
In Homa Bay town in Kenya's Nyanza province, the 32,600 residents depend on a water supply system that was constructed in 1958. The report says that water supply in Homa Bay "is not continuous and the system suffers from illegal connections, leakages, old age and blockages." The resultant losses are so huge that as much as 40 per cent of the water is unaccounted for.
According to the report, this sorry state of affairs afflicts thousands of urban centres in low income countries. Although this is attributed to a host of problems, lack of finance and poor urban governance receive special attention in the report. For one, water and sanitation sectors in these centres are never considered for financial allocation in national budgets.
Secondly, the centres are hardly "known," since official statistics merely lump population in terms of either "rural" or "urban." Further, some centres remain invisible to officialdom as they are stashed away in the backyards of such major infrastructure as railways, resorts or ports of large cities.
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