Bringing sanitation to Uganda
Carolina Salgado from our Central Specimen Reception at St. Thomas’ Hospital, recently teamed up with some charitable workers and the Busoga Trust, to spend two weeks in Uganda and explore a variety of options to help the community of Jinja to solve their increasingly problematic lack of sanitation.
Lack of proper sanitation is a huge problem for the people of Uganda, with poor infrastructure and extreme poverty. The problem of poor sanitation is very much a ‘taboo’ subject that no one really wants to talk about; without access to toilets people routinely use the rivers and areas around their homes to dispose of human waste.
This presents an enormous public health risk in a country that is already rife with malaria and HIV, it was the task of Carolina and the rest of the charitable delegation to engage with key stakeholders and come up with a range of viable solutions to the problem.
Carolina and the team presented a number of options with the view of recycling the waste for functional use, providing a free resource to the poverty stricken community.
The favoured option was constructing a biogas facility on some spare land offered by the Mayor of Jinja, which would convert human waste into gas for use by the local people to cook food. Other options involved drying out the faeces and dusting with charcoal powder to make briquettes, which are 100% safe to cook food with and less than half the price of the wood and charcoal currently being used for this purpose.
Carolina left Uganda after two weeks of hard work and having faced a number of difficult challenges, but feeling positive and optimistic about the future. “It was a whirlwind experience, the poverty is just extreme and the corruption and lack of infrastructure posed huge challenges”.
“I met and worked with a number of fantastic people and feel like I have made a positive contribution. Hopefully we have laid down the foundations and brought together the relevant people to solve this issue. I would go back in a heartbeat and would encourage others to get involved with such worthy projects”.
Carolina was also very complimentary of Viapath who provided last hour support to enable her to embark on her journey: “I sent an email to CEO Richard Jones out of desperation three days before my trip, having only raised £50. It is not in my nature to ask people for money, even for such a good cause, I really struggled.”
“The very generous donation from Viapath was incredibly humbling and gave me the impetus I needed to push on and achieve my £800 target very quickly. Also the support from the communications team in helping me to raise the profile of my trip was fantastic, I’m just so grateful to everyone for their help.”
Carolina completed the trip as part of the Social Entrepreneurship module in her MBA degree (Masters of Business Administration). Well done to Carolina and the very best of luck with the rest of your studies.
