Green Hills, Blue Cities

planning of towns in consultation with the Town and Country Planning Board. As this legislation is largely ignored, many of the city’s housing projects do not adhere to the guidelines for the building of new residential and commercial buildings. As a result of inadequate city planning, the poor construct their homes in underserviced areas with no road network, water extension and sewage reticulation services. The inadequate planning is worsened by lack of coordination between Kampala City Council and infrastructure service providers such as NWSC and Uganda Electricity Distribution Company on matters of planning. CLOGGED DRAINAGE Kampala is facing increasing water drainage problems caused by the destruction of flood buffer zones such as wetlands, most of which have become slum settlements or croplands. A study by Byandala (2004) attributed Kampala’s drainage problems to: • The destruction of the upstream buffer zones that has reduced the runoff concentration time and increased the risk of flooding downstream; and • The clogging of artificial drainage systems with debris and garbage, causing flooding in the lower areas of Kampala where the poor are settled in informal settlements on the low-lying wetlands. The African Development Bank (2006) estimated that as much as 70 per cent of Kampala’s urban poor live in informal settlements. ECOSYSTEM HEALTH In order to eke out a living, the poor residents of Kampala depend on firewood and charcoal for energy, while at the same time engage in urban agriculture. In addition to the conversion of wetlands into barren patches for monoculture agricultural crops, deforestation is rampant in the city. In response to this encroachment of the urban environment, the Kampala City Council has embarked on a drainage improvement programme inwhich they have cleared andwidened drainage channels. Policy responses include the National Wetlands Policy (1995), which promotes the conservation of Uganda’s wetlands. Regulations are equally in place for the protection of river banks and lake shores. Despite the establishment of the Wetlands Inspection Division to enforce the above policies and regulations and to oversee the sustainable management of wetlands in the country, there has been little compliance with these measures.

ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION The raw water supply on which the poor residents of Kampala rely, are polluted from many sources, including industry and households. One such polluted source is Lake Victoria, a key water source for Kampala. According to MacDonald and others (2001), urban municipal loads account for 77 per cent Due to their exposure to a polluted environment, as well as their reliance on water from unsafe sources, the poor residents of Kampala are vulnerable to many diseases. Cholera and other water-borne diseases are a common occurrence in the slum dwellings of Kampala. Dysentery has been on the increase, not only in Kampala but the rest of the country, registering a fourfold increase in the number of reported cases between 1999 and 2002. The number of patients suffering from persistent diarrhoea reported at Mulago Hospital alone increased by 32 per cent in a three-year period up to 2003, with most of the reported cases coming from Banda, Makerere-Kivulu, Kamwokya and other slums of Kampala (NEMA 2003). Human Health Hazard

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