“Clean” Rwanda, Part 3
By Perry Beeman | October 14, 2009 | Rwanda
I wrote earlier about how clean the streets are in Rwanda. In general, the country is surprisingly clean, especially by African standards. But I’ve learned there are plenty of serious environmental challenges here.
The air is full of smoke and soot, open dumping is a problem in places and the waterways run the color of creamed coffee.
Here’s more. Rwanda has next to no sewage systems. That includes Kigali, a city of approximately 1 million with no central system. Imagine if San Diego, Detroit or Dallas, which are roughly the same size, had only septic systems and pit toilets.
The government says Kigali probably never will have a central sewage system because of its hilly terrain.
In Kigali and in much of Rwanda, people merely dig pit toilets — channeling wastes in crude trenches to some low spot. Some have simple septic systems. Sludge is removed and dumped untreated in a low area, posing a huge health threat, environmental officials say. In some cases, wastes are dumped in marshes that are one of Rwanda’s last natural defenses against the heavy runoff that comes with removing vast areas of forest and replacing trees with crops.
In 2006, the government reports, 5.4 percent of urban households had flush toilets. In the rural areas,95 percent of households had either crude pit toilets or ventilated ones.
Industries such as manufacturing and mining account for about 14 percent of Rwanda’s gross domestic product. Their wastes basically get dumped everywhere, reports the Rwanda Environment Management Agency.
In one particularly significant situation, an industrial park in the Gikondo-Nyabugogo wetland system sends toxic chemicals into the Nyabarongo River. That stream dumps into the Akagera River, which feeds one of Africa’s natural wonders: Lake Victoria in neighboring Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya.
Rwanda has some garbage collection, but the trash is dumped in open areas, not landfilled. Kigali’s wastes have been layered in a range of dumps, including a large one at Nyanza, where methane has collected and may be used to produce energy.
“These disposal sites, already overflowing, are currently nonsanitary, posing serious health risk to human health and the environment, and their proper handling is currently beyond the capacity of the City Authority,” wrote the authors of the federal government’s first comprehensive environmental report card.
The government is looking to adopt modern landfilling regulations.
The health issues related to all this contamination are among the reasons the Rwanda government is pushing people to live in settlements, where it will be easier to provide central water and waste systems.
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