Professors bring clean water and hope to isolated Ugandan villages

Imagine a place where bacterial levels in drinking water are 100-times worse than swimming beaches in America and HIV infection rates approach 90 percent.

Settled by political refugees and fugitives, the Buvuma Islands in Uganda’s Lake Victoria are notorious for their lawlessness and poverty. For the past two years, Carolina professors Buz Kloot in the Earth Sciences and Resources Institute and Terry Wolfer in the College of Social Work have journeyed to the islands for several weeks each summer to help set up clean drinking water systems—and promote community ownership of these systems.

“Fifteen years ago, it was very dangerous for outsiders to go to the Buvumas, and it’s still lawless to a certain extent,” said Kloot, a native of Namibia in southwest Africa.

Cut off from the mainland, the Buvuma Islands have no electricity, running water, or sewerage systems. Rainwater runoff washes human and animal fecal contaminants into Lake Victoria, which is the source of the Nile River and the islanders’ drinking water.

Installing the water systems in the villages addresses a direct and serious need, Wolfer said, “but we can also use those [water sterilizing] devices as a basis for community development.” This past summer, Wolfer led community leaders in an exercise called “appreciative inquiry” to identify and build upon community strengths and to increase their leadership capacity.

“There are 100 villages and only eight water systems installed so far, so we hope to add more systems,” Kloot said. “But what we’re beginning to see is that access to sanitation and clean water is more about information and choices. Technology without knowledge doesn’t leave them much better off.”