Doreen Acan, the Head Teacher of Kitgum Public Primary School, one of the schools hit hard by the water shortage says that the irregular water supply has greatly affected the learning of Primary Seven pupils. The school currently has a total of 167 candidates waiting to sit for Primary Leaving Examination-PLE.
Several residents in
some parts of Kitgum Municipality have raised concern over water shortage.
This follows an
irregular supply of water since the month started by the National Water and
Sewerage Corporation- Nwsc.
The
situation has since affected several households, business premises and learning
institutions, forcing hundreds of water users to turn to the available few
unsafe boreholes and wells.
Doreen
Acan, the Head Teacher of Kitgum Public Primary School, one of the schools hit
hard by the water shortage says that the irregular water supply has greatly
affected the learning of Primary Seven pupils. The school currently has a total
of 167 candidates waiting to sit for Primary Leaving Examination- PLE.
She says it has been a daunting challenge for the management to adequately
provide water for usage by the pupils, teachers, and support staff. At some
points, she says pupils who are in boarding have to trek long distances outside
school premises in search of water for laundry work, bathing and drinking.
According to Acan, the management has since been buying water from the nearby
water sources but notes that it’s becoming expensive to sustain.
“We sometimes send people to buy water in jerry-cans for our pupils and the
staffs to use, we have also been getting water freely from Kitgum Hospital and
the Mosque but all this is proving to be costly to transport,” She says.
Irene Adong, a resident of Central Division says their tap went dry on Friday
and since then they haven’t had a single drop of water. She says the family
shifted to a nearby borehole but expressed fear that the borehole water may be
contaminated with fecal matters due to the high population and latrine
structures around it.
Ivan Tekakwo, the NWSC Public Relations Officer for Northern Region
acknowledges the water challenge in the Municipality and attributes it to the
current unreliable electricity supply.
He says power blackout occasionally forces them to rely on using a generator
which is costly and most times operated at only half capacity to pump less
quantity of water. For close to two weeks now, there has been intermittent
power supply in Kitgum Municipality.
Tekakwo also notes that the demand for water within Kitgum Municipality has
recently shot up this dry season since several water points such as river and
wellsprings have dried up leaving tap water as the only alternative.
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NWSC has been pumping about two million litres of water daily to their clients
within Kitgum Municipality. However, with the intermittent electricity, the
supply has dropped between one million and sometimes only 900,000 litres of
water daily according to Tekakwo.
Currently, a total of 3,791 clients are directly connected to the NWSC pipeline
with thousand more benefiting from buying.
