KAMPALA – Community Integrated Development Initiatives (CIDI) has scaled up its water, sanitation, and hygiene support to urban schools to help keep students safe and healthy.
With funding from the Danish People’s Aid, the WASH supplies distributed by CIDI to schools within Nakawa Division include sanitary towels, water taps, water harvest tanks, incinerators and changing rooms for girls among other facilities.
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Hellen Kasujja, the Deputy Executive Director for CIDI said that the critical water and sanitation infrastructure projects given to schools will help to keep students safe and healthy.
Kasujja urged beneficiary schools to protect the facilities donated to them.
“KCCA schools are facing encroachers from nearby communities because the schools lack fencing. This poses a risk to the facilities that are within these schools but also to the fact that KCCA or the government that is going to spend more money while evicting on the school land knowingly. “
She urged the government to allocate money to fencing public schools in high-risk areas such as Kampala.
Peter Phoning, the Development Coordinator at the Danish People’s Aid said facilities like the rainwater harvesting system will help schools cut their bills significantly and also create a favorable environment for learners in school.
“When you take a look out here, you will see that the community is just nearby and that the conditions under which they are living are very difficult, but their children also need school conditions in school. They now have at least much better conditions here at school than they do at home,” Mr. Phoning said during an interview.
He added: “We are hoping that that way is providing a much better future for the pupils because it is not just about the facilities, it’s also about involving everybody from the pupils, the teachers, and in fact up to the mayor’s office, if I can put that way, that whole governance part around it, that we organize ourselves in order to ask for our rights which is rightful and also for decent sanitation facilities”.
At least seven schools including Police Children’s School in Ntinda, St. Paul Primary School in Banda, St. James Primary School in Bbiina, and Murchison Bay Primary School in Luzira.
Others are Naguru Katali Primary School, St. Jude Naguru Primary School, and Mbuya Church of Uganda Primary School.
For young people without clean water, decent toilets, and handwashing facilities in their schools, it’s normal for them to miss their lessons to walk long distances to collect water or use bushes on the school grounds to go to the loo in the open.
Girls often miss school days or drop out of education entirely because they are on their period and have no safe, private, and hygienic facilities to manage them.
Recent figures show the staggeringly slow progress Uganda is making towards all children having clean water, decent toilets and somewhere to wash their hands at their school.
