ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS CAN SUBSTITUTE FIREWOOD
BY ROBERT OWINY

The New Vision recently reported that the desert is spreading across Uganda , capturing even the districts which were not in the "cattle corridor", a climatically non-vibrant region.

According to the report, this implies that the number of districts that will need food assistance is increasing, hence minimizing the hope of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a global initiative aimed at promoting human development and environmental sustainability in a few years to come.

One may not believe that 40% of Ugandans today live in a semi-arid desert which has slowly continued to eat away the land.

The bad news for Ugandans is that 51% of the country’s land today is semi-arid compared to the 40% in 1996. This great desert movement is reportedly compelled by poor land management practices such as overgrazing, logging for charcoal and constant forest destruction.

A survey has also shown that academic institutions in the country are greatly contributing to forest destruction as they heavily rely on wood for cooking for the large number of students.

A source at Makerere University which is also the largest academic institution in the country indicated that two Lorries of firewood are used by each hall of residence within one week.

In every month therefore the University burns over 90 Lorries of firewood in its 12 halls of residence. However the university also uses gas to substitute firewood sometimes. “If we were to rely fully on firewood we would demand about four lorries per week” a warden at one of the halls said.

At Highland secondary school, the headmistress Ms Nabbosa Hamidah says parents supply the school with up to about a full lorry of firewood which they cut from the surrounding forests on a weekly basis.

“It is true schools demand a lot of firewood, the forests have to suffer because there is no alternative” she says.

Given the current government policy which enables a large number of students to access free education at different levels, these institutions will apparently keep increasing their demand for firewood.

This means an end to forest destruction may not be easily achieved. To make matters worse, fertility rate in the country is also climbing the ladder. Parents now take the advantage of the free education offered to children and produce as many as they want.

According to Marc Nerclove, a researcher writing in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, she writes that in much of the third world, fertility is likely to react positively to increasing environmental degradation because parents perceive the benefits of having more children to be higher under environmentally adverse circumstances.

The question then is, can alternatives be sought for these institutions? Experts say yes but with government support.

Dr. Grace Nakabonge from the department of forestry at Makerere University says the government should reduce the heavy taxes on alternative fuel sources like Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) to be easily accessed by these institutions if they are to abandon the use of firewood. A kilo of LPG costs sh3595.

A single hall of residence at Makerere University consumes 500kg of the gas in a fortnight. This is very costly compared to a full lorry of firewood which goes for sh250000. As such, academic institutions rely so much on wood fuel.

The idea of finding alternatives to wood is not new. In Kenya , the government banned the collection of firewood from World Heritage sites recently. The over 20,000 educational institutions of Kenya were forced to find alternatives.

A project to replace open-fire cooking systems in schools with heavy duty brick insulated stainless steel stoves consuming 60-70% less firewood was a success. Other institutions adopted the use of LPG. Such changes could easily change the Ugandan condition, experts believe.