Gov't pledges to combat disease through improved sanitation

Poor sanitation is responsible for a colossal 80 percent of Uganda’s total disease burden, according to Health Minister Brig Jim Muhwezi. He said that in response to the appalling statistic, the Ugandan government had pledged to halve the number of people without access to sanitation services by 2005. The minister was speaking on Tuesday at the launching ceremony of Uganda’s new Sanitation and Hygiene Capacity Building programme, funded by the British Department for International Development (DFID) and managed by government departments. The programme was conceived with the professed aim of “raising the profile of sanitation and hygiene in Uganda’s battle against poverty”. Rather than offering something radically new, government officials and donors said the plan was an effort to shore up strategies for improving sanitation that are already in place, by better coordinating the efforts of local authorities. In his opening remarks, Muhwezi spoke openly about the “appalling sanitation situation in this country”, saying that currently just over half the population of Uganda had access to adequate sanitation. He said poor sanitation was a major link in Uganda’s poverty cycle, causing ill-health and damaging productivity. “Colossal sums of money are spent by individual families, by the ministry of health and by local authorities on treatment of diseases which would otherwise be avoided if we improved living conditions,” he noted. The minister said he was confident the programme would “strengthen Uganda’s efforts to accelerate the delivery of sanitation services”. DFID representative Simon Kenny told IRIN the US $800,000 that the department is committing will go to the health ministry's Environmental Health Division (EHD), rather than swelling the coffers of local authorities responsible for sanitation. “This programme isn’t really about throwing more money at the district councils," said Kenny. "It's about setting up a mechanism to ensure that proper policies are in place to get that money spent wisely.”