SDG 4 IN UGANDA

Harriet Achieng’s story

The Toshiba CarbonZero Scheme supports the ongoing activities to rehabilitate and maintain boreholes in Uganda. These are mainly boreholes which have fallen into disrepair, denying communities access to safe water and forcing people to boil water in order to make it safe, thereby contributing to CO2 emissions.

Following major efforts under the Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015), primary enrolment in developing countries now stands at 91%. However, absenteeism and drop-outs remain major challenges, and 57 million primary- age children worldwide are not enrolled in school at all. Over half of all children not enrolled in primary school live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Harriet Achieng

14-year-old Harriet Achieng is a student at Amele Primary School. Her family are users of the Otikori borehole that is maintained by CO2balance under the Toshiba Carbon Zero scheme, having been first rehabilitated under the project in 2013. She lives half a kilometre from the borehole and says that she is proud to have a clean water source near her home.

Harriet recounts how, before the rehabilitation of the borehole, she and her siblings would frequently miss school due to suffering from diarrhoea, suspected to be caused by drinking water from the dirty pools which were their only water source at that time. When sources closer to home dried up, the children would also often have to walk long distances to collect water, which ate into their time for homework and was detrimental to their classroom performance. Now that they have a safe water supply so close to home, the children’s health problems have been all but eliminated and they no longer have to spent so many hours searching for water, as their parents are able to collect water when returning from the fields.

The children’s school attendance is now much more consistent. Prior to the rehabilitation of the borehole, they would frequently suffer breaks in their schooling due to non-payment of school fees, with the parents’ financial situation severely burdened by purchasing medication to treat waterborne illnesses. However, with this burden removed, the children now attend school regularly. For her part, Harriet is now in her final academic year of primary school. She is confident of achieving the grades to reach secondary school in her final exams and feels excited for the future.

Mr Joseph Alengo, the headteacher of Amele Primary School, has also praised the Toshiba CarbonZero scheme. He reports: “Since the rehabilitation of Otikori borehole in 2013 under the Toshiba CarbonZero scheme, there is an improvement in the general cleanness of pupils at Amele Primary school. Teachers are also happy because they are finding it easier to conduct health parades at school. This has reduced cases of waterborne illnesses and increased school attendance and performance greatly.”

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Toshiba Carbon Zero Scheme

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