A water and sanitation success story in Uganda — but the question is how to sustain it

By Fadeke Ayoola

 Mon, 02/26/2018

The community fish pond in Kigungu, Entebbe, created to promote sustainable practices, self-sufficiency and to reduce over fishing in Lake Victoria.

Last year, I attended the African Great Lakes Conference in Entebbe, Uganda, joining over 300 specialists who presented on a wide range of water issues. The highlight of the conference, for me, was visiting the Integrated Community Environmental Conservation project in Arul village, Kigungu, in Entebbe.

The project aims to reduce bio-diversity loss, pollution of international waters of Lake Victoria, land degradation, and address some effects of climate change. The fact that the project was managed by a women’s empowerment network made the prospects of the visit more interesting. Mainstreaming gender in environmental and conservation work is an issue that needs to be addressed.

We arrived in Arul village, Kigungu, in the afternoon. The Kigungu area was a place where wetlands had been polluted, contaminated, and devastated by illegal sand mining, poor waste management, and climate change, among other issues. However, since 2006, the Integrated Community Environmental Conservation project has been addressing these issues.

A Sustainable Fish Pond
In the village, we visited a community pond filled with tropical fish. The pond was created to promote sustainable fishing practices and self-sufficiency in food production. For example, the tropical fish were used for local food production with the surplus fish stock sold in the local market as a small business venture which earned local women a small wage. The pond is also used to reduce over fishing in Lake Victoria.

Local fishermen enter the pond and demonstrate sustainable fishing practices

The fish pond is reaping benefits for the local community – a good practice that should be replicated in other local villages. However, as a trained environmental auditor, I had concerns over the quality of the water which appeared muddy and slightly dark in color. In my field of work, it is recommended that the pond water is green in color; deep dark colors should be avoided to gain good fish yield. The color of the pond water is usually a good indicator of the quality of the water. The deterioration of the water quality of the pond may be in its early stages. Without testing the water quality, it is difficult to assess; but the color indicates that the pond is in need of monitoring to evaluate whether the water quality may, if untreated, affect the fish stock. To ensure that the fish pond continues to produce local food for self-sufficiency in a sustainable manner, water quality monitoring and maintenance is essential to continue the success story.

Ecological Sanitation Toilets
The success story of conservation in this village continues, when we visited the ecological sanitation toilets. We learned that there was a water shortage in the village, which was multiplied by a high-water table which causes groundwater contamination. Due to these circumstances the women’s network decided to build ecological sanitation toilets, since these toilets can function within a closed system which does not require water.

After visiting an ecological sanitation toilet, I must say it is another good practice, a beacon of excellence in conservation that addresses the challenge and relationship between water shortage and sanitation. We discussed the principle of using this new technology, where the nutrients in the waste is recycled to create manure and fertilizer for agriculture, improving soil productivity for small-scale farmers. This vital technology was used to train three hundred local community members in the use and maintenance of the system. It was quite impressive.

But it also occurred to me that the nature of these new ecological sanitation toilets means they will require routine checks, monitoring, and regular training as well as sustainable policies and laws and regulations to enforce such actions.

According to the UN Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and drinking water, in Uganda, there are neither national standards for monitoring sanitation and drinking water, nor independent tests on water quality

A community ecological sanitation toilet - a model of good practice in conservation.

What is the future for these innovative conservation water and sanitation projects without adequate monitoring, measuring, analysis, and evaluation? How will these projects be measured for environmental performance? How will their success story be sustainable without monitoring and evaluation?

The upfront initial investment in water conservation projects is going well, and making a difference across Africa, but long-term monitoring and evaluation needs to be put in place as well. There is evidence that some projects started out as beacons of excellence in conservation tend to need extra investment in monitoring and evaluation to continue the success story.

Fadeke Ayoola is the CEO of NET Africa.

To Build a Brighter Future, Invest in Women and Girls

By Jim Yong Kim

Thu, 03/08/2018

As we mark International Women’s Day 2018, there has never been a more critical time to invest in people, especially in women and girls.

Skills, knowledge, and know-how – collectively called human capital – have become an enormous share of global wealth, bigger than produced capital such as factories or industry, or natural resources.

But human capital wealth is not evenly distributed around the world, and it’s a larger slice of wealth as countries develop. How, then, can developing countries build their human capital and prepare for a more technologically demanding future? The answer is they must invest much more in the building blocks of human capital – in nutrition, health, education, social protection, and jobs. And the biggest returns will come from educating and nurturing girls, empowering women, and ensuring that social safety nets increase their resilience.

According to UNESCO estimates, 130 million girls between the age of 6 and 17 are out of school, and 15 million girls of primary-school age – half of them in sub-Saharan Africa – will never enter a classroom. Women’s participation in the global labour market is nearly 27 percentage points lower than for men, and women’s labour force participation fell from 52 percent in 1990 to 49 percent in 2016.

What if we could fix this? Fostering women’s labor force participation, business ownership, and improvements in productivity could add billions to the global economy.

Educating a girl, educating a nation

There is no question the biggest bang for the buck in development is girls’ education. In the 1920s, the Ghanaian scholar James Emman Aggrey said, “If you educate a man you simply educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a whole nation."

A World Bank study found that every year of secondary school education is correlated with an 18 percent increase in a girl’s future earning power. And research shows that educating girls has a multiplier effect. Better-educated women tend to be healthier, participate more in the formal labor market, earn more, give birth to fewer children, marry at a later age, and provide better health care and education to their children.

In April 2016, I announced we would invest $2.5 billion over five years through education projects that directly benefit adolescent girls. I’m excited to report that demand for this financing has been so strong that we’ve surpassed this commitment by investing $3.2 billion over the past two years—three years ahead of schedule.

Leveraging Innovative financing for health

The World Bank Group and the Global Financing Facility (GFF) also are investing heavily in adolescent girls’ health. The GFF, a multi-stakeholder partnership hosted by the Bank, is helping countries tackle the worst health and nutrition issues affecting women, children and adolescents. Through the GFF’s innovative approach to financing, countries are increasing investment in the health of their people, which is saving and improving lives and increasing countries’ ability to thrive in the global economy.

For example, in Bangladesh, the GFF is working across sectors to stem early marriage and early pregnancies, reduce maternal and neonatal deaths, and improve adolescent health and well-being. The country is reducing dropouts among female and disadvantaged students, including sexual and reproductive health and rights and gender equity in curricula; and providing adolescent health services, including to girl students.

Together these interventions will help keep girls in school, delay the age of marriage, and postpone the timing of their first birth to increase the chances of survival for both mother and child.

Breaking down barriers by expanding access to finance

Only 30 percent of formal small and medium enterprises around the world are owned and run by women, and lack of access to finance is a major reason. We estimate there is a $1.48 trillion annual credit deficit for these women-owned businesses.

With more than $340 million in funding from 13 governments, the new Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative aims to mobilize more than $1 billion to help women start and grow their businesses, with increased access to finance, markets, and networks.  We-Fi will soon allocate its first round of financing.

Digital technology can also help women cut across other hurdles, such as cultural barriers, to open a bank account in their name and narrow the 7 percent gender gap in bank account ownership documented by the Global Findex database.

In China, our private sector-focused arm, IFC, partnered with Ant Financial, an affiliate of China’s Alibaba Group, to use Internet-based financing to expand lending to more Chinese micro and small enterprises and women-owned businesses.

Gathering evidence to inform policy

Data and evidence are crucial for decision-making.  One of our major flagships, Women, Business and the Law, identifies laws that hold women back. The most recent edition found that 100 of 173 countries limit the kind of work women can do. In 18 economies, women cannot get jobs without the consent of their husbands. There are also significant gaps in average wages of salaried women and men in both the formal and informal sectors.

A recent study found that close to 1.4 billion women lack legal protection against economic abuse such as intimidation and coercion. At the same time, more than one-in-three countries lack laws to protect against sexual violence at home at the hand of an intimate partner or family member.

The Tackling Childcare report draws on 10 case studies to find that offering childcare led to a substantial reduction in employee turnover; improved the quality of applicants and the speed at which vacancies can be filled; increased productivity through reduced absences, greater focus, and enhanced motivation and commitment; and improved gender diversity and the advancement of women into leadership positions.

We’re committed to helping countries close gender gaps as they look for new drivers of economic growth and build human capital. Aid alone will not be enough to effect real change. Change will come when government leaders and people around the world push for massive investments in people, and we will use our resources and expertise to make that demand a reality.