Students offer clean water to Deaf children

EDUCATION | WATER | DEAF

Unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and lack of hygiene not only affect the health, safety, and quality of life of children but also claims lives estimated to 1.5 million children under the age of five who die each year from diarrhea according to UNICEF.

Since 2010, the United Nations recognizes the right to safe and clean drinking water, and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.

It is because of this background, that plumbing students of Nakawa Vocational college (NVTC) took a three-day off to clean and unblock the water channels at Uganda School for the Deaf Ntinda.

One of the staff at the school, who preferred anonymity said the school has several water tanks, however, the gutters and pipes were blocked with dust which makes its collection very hard.

“During this rainy season we hardly collected enough water to support the school because of the leakages within the old water gutters and taps in the shower rooms,” she said.

She adds that even students are excited about the fact that they can now get clean and safe water after the students coming in to solve the problem.

According to Tyson Kakande, a plumbing student at (NVTC) improving water, sanitation and hygiene services in institutions such as schools reduces hygiene-related diseases and can help curb missing of schools by students due to diarrhea.

“When we visited the school in 2019, we found it in a sorry state where we discovered the school needed a lot of maintenance, especially the water tanks, the drainage systems, showers, taps as well as water gutters which were blocked by dust.”