Ngora town water supply

摘要

NGORA IS A TOWN of some 22,000 inhabitants in north east Uganda. During the colonial period, it was the centre of extensive missionary activity, a heritage which has left it with a remarkable number of medical and educational institutions including 8 schools, 2 colleges of further education and 2 hospitals. A further inheritance from that period was a water supply system, built in the 1950s, which was then an example of the state of the art. Originally, water was drawn from a small reservoir behind a low earthen embankment, but this was later abandoned in favour on an intake on the Agu River, in fact a connecting channel between two large freshwater lakes. From this intake, water was pumped some 12 kms to a treatment works at Kobuku, built on the slopes of a granite intrusion, which towers over the town. These works provided for aeration, clarification, coarse and fine filtration and chlorination before the water was put into storage. From the treated water storage tanks, water was distributed to the various institutions and to public standpoints in the town. During the insurgency period in this part of Uganda, these works were put out of operation and various parts were vandalised at a time when no funds were available for their repair. More recently, the pumping main which was constructed originally alongside the Agu-Ngora road, became damaged by construction traffic engaged on repairing this road. In 1996, Vision Terudo (VT), a local non-governmental organisation set up to provide training in health, hygiene and water related issues, approached Christian Engineers in Development (CED) for assistance in rehabilitating the works. In the following year CED mounted a project appraisal. The resulting report (CED 1997) recommended, as Phase 1, the rehabilitation, of the former scheme, sufficient to restore an urgently needed basic supply to the people of Ngora, followed by extensions in Phases 2 & 3 to match increasing demands from the growing population and from rising expectations of service. This report was used to raise funds from the National Lottery Charities Board (NLCB), the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Beatrice Laing Foundation, sufficient for Phase 1 of the work to proceed. To permit this to happen, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by CED with the Department for Water Development (DWD), Kumi District Local Government (KLG) and VT setting out the respective roles of these parties in the then proposed works.