Nyaruguru gets water and sanitation project
Salt Wash (Saving Lives Through Water Sanitation and Hygiene) project was on Thursday launched to increase the number of people with access to sustainable clean water and hygiene in Nyaruguru district, Southern Rwanda.
The 42-month project will operate in seven of Nyaruguru’s 14 sectors, namely Rusenge, Ngoma, Ngera, Nyagisozi, Munini, Muganza and Nyabimata, and will cost 1,100,000 Euros – an estimated Rwf 880,000,000.
For François Habitegeko, Nyaruguru district mayor, his district is lucky.
“Salt Wash comes as a solution because water and electricity are still the limiting factors to the development of our population. So we are lucky to have such a serious partnerâ€, he said, addressing a gathering of over 200 people at Pacis mini-hotel in Kibeho sector, Nyaruguru district.
Dativa Nyiramyasiro, a community health worker in Nyabimata sector, is equally optimistic.
“Salt Wash is going to help us enhance hygiene is our householdsâ€, she said.
Officiating at the function, Joseph Katabarwa, head of environmental health in Rwanda’s Health Ministry, said more water sanitation and hygiene will translate into a decline in diseases caused by poor hygiene conditions.
According to Katabarwa, 11 per cent of children (about 66,000 children to be precise) die in Rwanda yearly before they turn five years old, because of poor hygiene-related diseases.
Worldwide, Katabarwa revealed, the picture is gloomy, still. About 2,200,000 children under the age of five years die each year of poor hygiene diseases, according to the World Health Organisation.
As for Health Poverty Action (HPA), an NGO that runs the Salt Wash project, it believes the programme will, by its end, have met some of Rwanda’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) like MDGs4 and MDGs5, with regard to reducing child and mother mortality rates, respectively. To this, the project will add the construction of more toilets in schools in the seven sectors in Nyaruguru district.
Two other water and sanitation programmes already operate in Nyaruguru district, that is the country’s Energy, Water and Sanitation Authority (EWASA) and PEPAPS (Programme d’Eau Potable et d’Assainissement en milieu rural de la Province du Sud), the later being a water and sanitation programme operating in rural areas of Rwanda’s Southern Province.
Figures from Nyaruguru district suggest that over 70 per cent of its population already have access to clean water.
Salt Wash project is funded by European Union. HPA (which is running the Salt Wash project) started in 1984 and it operates in 13 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. In Rwanda, it began in 1998 as Health Unlimited which was popular, and still is, with its Urunana radio soap opera, spreading mainly reproductive health and development messages.
The same radio soap opera − this news website understands − is likely to feature some messages to help with behavioral change of the population, therefore making Salt Wash project a success story.
