7 May 2008
The provision of safe water to the population is one of the ways to not only curtail water related diseases, but also poverty levels. But the water service sector faces an uphill task in offering clean, safe and affordable water, writes Bamuturaki Musinguzi.
Although the meagre earnings from vending water have enabled 28-year-old Hasifa Nandawula barely cope with the high cost of living in the city of Kampala - the single mother's wish is to improve her income to support her three children.
Nandawula, a water vendor in Church Zone, Kisenyi II in Kampala Central is employed by the owner of a public water stand tap, where she sells water worth Shs5,000 per day and is paid Shs1,000 as her daily wage.
"The Shs1,000 I earn everyday is not enough," Nandawula said, quickly adding: "But I have nothing to do." "One time I was preparing breakfast meals where I made a profit of between Shs2,000 - 3,000. But because my customers reduced tremendously I can no longer supplement my income."
Left with no option, Nandawula took her children to her village home to reduce on the cost of feeding three extra mouths in the city but who would afford to attend school there.
"I decided to take my children to Kawolo village, Lugazi in Mukono district where they attend school. The eldest 14-year-old boy is in Primary 7 while the youngest who is eight years old, is in Primary 3. I always go there after a month to check on them."
Nandawula with three other single mothers rent a one-roomed house in Kisenyi at Shs20,000 per month with each contributing Shs5,000 per month. The other three mothers also decided to settle their children in their respective villages to avoid the costs of looking after them in the city.
Nandawula is among the hundreds of poor people in Kampala benefiting from the Urban Pro Poor project managed by the National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC).
As a public utility NWSC has a mission to serve the poor. It has established the Urban Pro Poor branch that coordinates all the urban poor customers' activities; new connections, billing, collections and other innovative services to this segment.
This also includes water and sanitation, sustainable agriculture, advisory services and micro finance.
NWSC's definition of the poor is those households with incomes of less than Shs80,000 and in most cases earned on a day to day basis (piece meals), clustered settlements with high crowding index of 0.25 - 14 people per household, very low water consumption of between 0 - 20 litres per capita per day and customers who do not have their own connections and use mainly public water points.
The overall goal of the Urban Pro Poor programme is to provide improved access to piped water services to poor households living in slum areas of Kampala city, through provision of public water points and yard tap connections.
The central government represented by both the ministries of water and finance, maintains a performance contract with NWSC. In turn NWSC has developed a set of delegated area management contracts through which it monitors the performance of its 23 towns of operations or the water supply service areas.
The Urban Pro Poor programme has been met with a number of challenges. "There is a problem of land scarcity and ownership to allocate facilities," the Urban Pro Poor manager, J.B. Otema Adonga said.
"Urban communities are too complex and ever shifting thus hindering sustainability of the set up facilities and services," Adonga added. "Natural calamities like high water table, flooding and collapsing soils have disrupted the effective implementation of NWSC activities," Adonga said.
There is also bureaucracy of local government structures which affect service to the poor. "There is information gap between policy makers, service providers and local communities or beneficiaries in regard to water and sanitation service delivery to the urban poor."
Many of the beneficiaries have been disconnected by NWSC for failure to pay their water bills because of the poor incomes. According to the NWSC Project Manager, Eng. Paddy Twesigye, average sales on stand water points are Shs67,000 per month.
A vendor will only be left with Shs50,000 as his income after paying a monthly water bill of Shs20,000. The Shs50,000 is not enough to meet one's daily needs and therefore cannot be relied on as a livelihood and will therefore not provide quality service.
"The temptation not to remit the Shs20,000 water bill is high and that is why several have been disconnected. It is high risk to deal with the poor communities because after connecting them do you disconnect them and yet this service has to make economic sense. Do we provide free water to these communities like South Africa does? Our economy is not at that level," Twesigye said.
"With low tariffs the intention is to have the poor man have access to cheap water but who benefits, the poor or the well to do? In the end it's the poorest that have to pay dearly to get water," Twesigye noted.
Studies have shown that there is a relationship between water consumption and the distance involved from the water points; the further it is the less consumption even to cover basic health requirements. Ugandans consume five litres of water per day compared to the ten litres recommended by international bodies.
The water and sanitation sector performance measurement target for water collection time in rural areas is 27 minutes, while for the urban areas it is 7 minutes.
Drinking water collection time was considered as the waiting time at the source, and the time to and from water source. For the rural areas, the survey revealed 93 minutes during the dry season, and 63 minutes during the wet season.
However, for the urban areas, the waiting time was 60 minutes during the dry season and 42 minutes during the wet season. The reasons for the long water collection time were unreliable water sources, long distances and long queues at water points. Furthermore, the 2000 NSDS revealed that households were on average spending 43 and 31 minutes at a water source during the dry and wet season respectively, in the rural area.
Urban dwellers were paying more than four times higher than their rural counterparts. At regional level, the average monthly payments for water ranged from Shs2,020 in northern region to Shs8,580 in Kampala. Overall, households were willing to pay fees for water than what they were actually paying, with the exception of the northern region where residents were willing to pay Shs630 more for water.
Women were responsible for collection of water in about a third of the total households. The findings also revealed that water vending was more common in urban areas (11 percent) than in the rural areas.
The NSDS revealed inadequate safe water sources as a major constraint that limited access to safe water. Over 50 percent of the households reported inadequate safe water sources as the major limiting factor.
The other important constraints in orders of their magnitude were; long distance and high cost of safe water. Overall, no marked variations were noted in the constraints reported by residences and regions. A 1996 Rural Water and Sanitation (RUWASA) study revealed that over 80 percent of contamination of drinking water in Uganda occurs either at the source, during transportation or at home.
The country is still experiencing cases of diseases associate with poor sanitation such as cholera, dysentery, worm infestation and malaria. Poor sanitation is a serious drain on the economy as government and local authorities spend colossal sums of money on treatment and drugs for sanitation related diseases. Individual families also spend their hard earned, meagre incomes on treatment of sanitation related diseases. Parents or caretakers may also lose work-time as they look after the sick ones.
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