Legislators sitting on the Parliamentary Forum on Water Sanitation and Hygiene have called for increased investment in the water sector to improve the quality of lives of the people in Uganda, saying the reliance on MPs to dig into their pockets to repair water sources like boreholes in their constituencies isn’t sustainable.
Lawmakers made the pleas while addressing journalists at Parliament, ahead of the annual Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Symposium in which civil society groups Twaweza East Africa and Centre for Policy Analysis (CEPA) released figures on the recent studies taken on the status of water and sanitation in Uganda indicating that 86% of have problems in accessing clean drinking water.
Silas Aogon, Chairperson Parliamentary Forum on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene revealed plans to hold a meeting with President Museveni to bring him up to speed with the challenges people in Uganda are encountering in terms of access to water and sanitation in Uganda.
He also described as inhumane the practice of charging people to access sanitation facilities and called for free access to water and toilets on major highways, instead of condemning travelers to use bushes, actions he says put the health of people living around areas where open defecation takes place in jeopardy.
MPs were to increase oversight over WASH projects in their areas to make sure that when the Government releases money, that money is being utilized, revealing that when some of the districts get money, they take 6months without utilizing it, and at times such money ends up being returned to the consolidated fund.
Legislators called on increased investment in WASH projects to avoid any catastrophe in case Uganda encountered another pandemic as was the case for COVID-19, that needed access to clean water for people to wash their hands to reduce the spread of the deadly virus.
Findings from TWAWEZA data collected from 2,809 respondents across Uganda in August and September 2023 indicate that 6 out of 10 citizens (63%) name access to water as a serious problem affecting their communities including 4 out of 10 who say it is the most serious problem (39%). It’s also indicated that 5% of households in the country have no toilets to ease themselves while only 2% have flush toilets.
