Day 3, Street Food, Buwama

Something interesting happened today, I had my first meeting! Thankfully it was a small affair with a potential partner organisation to increase functionality in water, sanitation and hygiene advocacy (WASH) programmes. They take a slightly different approach that should improve the ownership of these programmes in the villages that they are put in place for. Our rough estimates (more base-lining needed), is that between 40% and 60% of water projects, whether shallow well pumps, rainwater harvesting, or deep water standpipes, fail within the first few years, often within the first 12 months. There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is the lack of adequate maintenance.

Individual villages are responsible for the upkeep for these solutions after they are put in place with training for maintenance, forming relevant village committee’s and education programmes on the importance of good hygiene. The main sticking point is that households within the village have to pay a monthly maintenance fee of c. 200 UGX (5p) per month for the upkeep.

This unfortunately doesn’t always happen and isn’t well enforced by the committee. Coupled with the slow changes in attitudes towards hygiene, the green water is free after all, means that the clean water solutions rapidly fall into disrepair.

This new approach, has all of the above aspects to create functionality longevity, but brings in a new approach to physical maintenance and improve advocacy, using credit and climate funding to provide subsidised and possibly free monthly maintenance checks from an expert. The discount is dependent on how well the villages score on a number of hygiene KPIs.

Seems a good idea and a differentiator of ‘me too’ clean water proposals. It also helps to encourage long term functionality which is necessary to change the current attitudes over generations not just a few months.

After finishing the meeting I high-tailed it to Buwama, where the Mpigi field office is based with my supervisor. Due to a lack of lunch we had a minor diversion to his house where we had the usual matoke, sweet potatoes and beans, then it was a fun but bumpy ride to Buwama.

Heading in to more rural Uganda it is clear what a beautiful country it is with its lush green hills and red soil. I look forward to seeing more and taking photos of it of the next 12 months. On arriving at my boss’ second home in Buwama I was introduced to Leon, a young volunteer from Germany, who has been based in Buwama for 7 months of a 12 month stint. I don’t think I’d have had the courage to do what he’s been doing at his age staying in a small rural town in Uganda. We went for a brief look at a local football match and after sunset headed down to the main road in the dark due to a power cut to grab some food.

I went for a Rolex, which is a lot more edible than the timepieces that the prestige Swiss brand makes, and a Pizza. The Rolex was exactly what you’d expect from a couple of fried eggs in a chapatti with a sprinkling of tomatoes. You can vary the number of eggs and chapatis depending on how hungry you are, and apparently in Kampala the eggs are more like an omelette than fried eggs. Not bad at all for 1500 UGX. The Pizza came in at 500 UGX, so the total amount of 2000 UGX is a bit less than 50p.

The Pizza isn’t a pizza in the Italian sense mind and I’m probably off on the spelling and pronunciation as it sounds closer to Pisa. The only similarity it has to a proper pizza is that it is roughly round and has some flour and tomatoes in it. It’s more like an omelette than anything and also has other veggies, in my case cabbage.

I enjoyed my first experience of street food, in the wonderful little town of Buwama, overall I’d give it a solid 3 out of 5 but may need to revise downward over time.

I was hoping to get a good night’s sleep in the small rural town, but my hope were dashed early on as my first visit to Buwama coincided with one of the supposedly rare occasions of a party at the local community centre just outside the compound. The live music continued till 2am ish.

Launch party tomorrow, should be interesting.