Kampala residents are breathing to death

HEALTH   ENVIRONMENT

KAMPALA - A number of factors stand in the way of Uganda's dream of becoming one of the best cities in the world. It may be ahead of other East African countries, but the Ugandan capital lags behind because of air pollution.

The bulk of air in Kampala is compromised by many pollutants, ranging from dust and smoke to chemical fumes. This means the air we breathe poses a health hazard to humans.

For instance, when you walk along a busy city street, you will inhale something like 20 million particles in a single lungful, some of them smaller than the width of a human hair.  Exposure to such pollution has become a big risk factor, silently causing deadly lung diseases.

Addressing journalists on Monday at the Media Center, the KCCA executive director Eng. Andrew Kitaka told journalists that because of the bad air Ugandans breath in every day, KCCA has purchased Air Quality Monitoring equipment to monitor and measure air pollution in Kampala.

(L-R) Justus Akankwasa, Acting Director Engineering and Technical Services Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) and Eng Andrew Kitaka, Acting Executive Director, KCCA being interviewed by journalists during the press briefing on the transformation of Kampala City 2020 held at Uganda Media Centre in Kampala on Monday, February 03, 2020. Photo by Shamim Saad

"The air in Kampala is polluted, people inhale it and get coughs and other lung diseases, we got funding from the European Union to improve the air quality, so we are going to install 25monitoring equipment to be able to tell the quality of air," said Kitaka.

Kitaka also noted that they have embarked on tarmacking dusty roads like Kulambiro Ring road, Lukuli and Kabuusu-Banawaya-Lweza among others with funding from the World Bank to reduce on the dust which the communities have been complaining about.   

A study conducted by KCCA in 2018 under the Kampala Climate Change Project showed that levels of pollution are beyond the World Health Organisation standard of 40 micrograms in 11 sites out of 14 sites around Kampala.

The pollution comes mainly from vehicles hence areas with high traffic have high pollution levels.

While meeting industrialists and factory owners, the KCCA director of Public Health and Environment Dr Daniel Okello Okello said that about 31,600 people in Uganda die due to air pollution-related diseases. 

"The number of people who die are in communities filled with dust, industrial areas and commercial areas which have cars that put out the fumes and dusty roads," Okello Okello said.

He said that air pollution in Kampala is mostly caused by dust from unpaved roads, fumes from cars and open burning of waste. Okello revealed according to their recent findings, they discovered that pneumonia and cough related diseases have increased for the last one year due to the polluted atmosphere.  

In his presentation, Okello noted that some interventions to reduce this pollution would be paving of roads and reducing the number of vehicle usage by using public transport.

In 2014, Bruce Kirenga founding Director of the Makerere University Lung Institute released a report titled, "the state of ambient air quality in two Ugandan cities-Kampala and Jinja. 

The report highlighted that there were low levels of pollution in residential areas that are paved. It also pointed out that there were high levels of pollution in commercial areas that were paved but with a high volume of traffic. 

This implies that particulate matter pollution is mainly contributed by dust and vehicle emissions in Kampala. 

From the same study, it was observed that the gaseous pollution of Nitrogen dioxide showed only two areas (Amir street Nakasero and Namugongo road Kireka) that exceeded the WHO threshold. 

According to the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), it is estimated that about 140,000 liters of fuel are burnt by idling cars every day worth sh500m. Small scale industries also emit high levels of carbon. These are some of the causes of poor air quality in the city as cited in the Journal of Environmental and Public Health published in February 2014.

KCCA is currently promoting the use of improved cooking stoves in schools, tree planting and implementing the Non-Motorized System as one of the ways of mitigating pollution.

Currently, over 10,000 trees have been planted, a pilot tree audit was undertaken and the Kampala Urban Forestry Management Plan is being developed and KCCA is also thinking of starting a pilot study which will reduce on the number of cars entering the city.