Emergency plan to tackle Katakwi health needs

Uganda's Ministry of Health is planning an emergency one-year health programme at a cost of 1.6 billion Uganda shillings (about US $909,000) for internally displaced people (IDPs) in the troubled northeastern district of Katakwi. The coordinator of the Katakwi Health Emergency Plan, Sam Engenyu, told IRIN that the plan, provisionally approved in mid-August, was expected to provide for sanitation and nutrition interventions for over 88,000 IDPs living in displacement camps as a result of raids by neighbouring Karamojong warriors. The Karamojong raids on Katakwi, which intensified in March last year and prompted Katakwi District Council into declaring a state of emergency last month, have systematically driven residents from their homes and forced them to build camps in which they live, sometimes without water and health services. [see related stories at: http://www.reliefweb.int/IRIN/archive/uganda.phtml] Many of the victims of the unrest in Katawi blame the government for failing to disarm the Karamojong warriors, and for paying little attention to their suffering. Sanitation in the camps was "very poor", and most of the IDPs did not have access to a health facility, UNOCHA reported on 6 September. Since IDPs only had very limited access to cultivable land, the food security of households had been "highly affected", it warned. The Ugandan Office of the Prime Minister, which has primary responsibility for coordinating assistance to Katakwi, also has a budget of 560 million shillings (US $318,000) to tackle Katakwi's poor water supply problem by drilling 40 boreholes in and around the IDP camps, humanitarian sources told IRIN on Wednesday. It has also proposed that UNICEF contribute 50 million shillings (US $28,000) to deal with HIV/AIDS, malaria, sanitation, and social mobilisation, sources said. The director of health services in Katakwi, William Komakech, has agreed that indications were that health conditions in the camps are deplorable. During an inter-agency meeting in Soroti on 26 August, he said one of the most common health problem in the camps was malnutrition, which had never been addressed. "Because of a combination of lack of the much-needed health services, and long distances to find [places] where such services are available, people have resorted to self-medication," Komakech said. He added that few of the camps in the district had outreach programmes for immunisation, saying that this service was only available at one of the displacement centres, at Magoro, where health workers were suffering from low morale and motivation. The recent abolition of cost-sharing in hospitals by the Ugandan government had complicated the situation further, since it increased the pressure on government health centres in the district, meaning that the few health centres in Katakwi, such as at Usuk and Kapelebyong, had run out of drugs, Komakech said. However, the Ministry of Health recently released 60 million shillings (over US $34,000) worth of drugs, condoms and mosquito nets to Katakwi, humanitarian sources told IRIN on Wednesday. Visitors to the district had also confirmed that mobile clinics had been seen visiting the more remote IDP camps, presumably distributing these supplies, they added. District officials have also expressed concern that, because of poverty in the IDP camps, young girls were being forced into marriage as early as 14 years, as a means of survival for their parents, who wanted to earn the bride price which accrued from such arrangements. The few cows used to pay bride price for girls and women when marriages took place were those that the displaced people have managed to flee with in the face of Karamojong attacks, and which are kept in communal kraals in the camps, according to a local resident, Emmanuel Ojakol. "Parents want their daughters to marry quickly so that they get cows, and [then] pay dowry for their sons. It is a chain," he told IRIN. "The parents of the boys also want their sons to marry quickly so that they get rid of the cows before the Karamojong come and take them," Ojakol added.