SDG 6 in Uganda

Imat Adongo Keren's story

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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 to make it safe, thereby contributing to CO2 emissions.

2.4 billion people today lack access to improved sanitation facilities, of whom 946 million people have no access to toilet facilities, forcing people to openly defecate, which presents a major challenge to public health.

65-year-old Imat Adongo Keren lives in Barilec village in Otuke district in Northern Uganda. She is a mother to 9 children and is a user of the borehole in the village which has been rehabilitated and maintained under the Toshiba CarbonZero scheme. She recounts the situation faced by her family prior to the rehabilitation of the borehole: “We were fetching water from an open well about 1km from home. This source was being shared with animals, used for washing clothes, used as a dumping site by children among others. Often, the little children would even use the source as a swimming pool which made it so contaminated. The animals would openly dump their waste at the water source as they came to drink some water. This is the same water we could fetch for use at home and because of that, we were constantly having diseases like diarrhoea and dysentery.”

The situation at the original water source demonstrates not only the struggle people faced to fetch safe water for drinking and personal hygiene, but also shows the lack of information people had about the importance of sanitation, given the manner in which the source was allowed to become contaminated. Since the rehabilitation of the Barilec borehole in 2014, the community has had access to a safe and secure water supply which draws on deep groundwater and is not exposed. Crucially, the community has also received annual WASH trainings on the importance of protecting the borehole from contamination and of personal hygiene. There are no latrines in the vicinity of the borehole and it is fenced off to protect it from animal incursion.

Imat says: “We are so happy to have this borehole and to be able to immediately access precious safe water. We also now WASH our hands at home after using the toilet and before eating, so don’t suffer anymore from diarrhoea. We used to lose so much time and spend so much money treating ourselves for disease, but now we have the time to work and invest in educating our children and grandchildren. All this has been made possible thanks to Toshiba’s CarbonZero scheme – so thank you!”

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