Gertrude Arineitwe spreads out her green polythene bag at the charcoal shelter. The charcoal seller, a woman from whom Arineitwe has bought charcoal for the past four years and who has become a friend, empties a spadeful of charcoal into the bag. Black dust wafts in the air.
Soot-colored pieces fall into the bag, clanging as they land. Arineitwe watches, waiting for the seller to add more. But she doesn’t.
She’s done — and the bag is only half full. Every day for the last seven years, Arineitwe has bought charcoal to brew bushera, a popular drink made by mixing sorghum flour and hot water, then letting the mixture cool overnight. She sells it to people in her neighborhood, Nansana, a fast-growing suburb of Kampala, especially to those who hail from western Uganda where culturally the drink is a luxury in every home.
Typically, she uses two spadesful of charcoal — around 4,000 Ugandan shillings’ (1 United States dollar’s) worth — to make her day’s brew. But now the same 4,000 shillings buys only half the amount. She considered increasing her prices to compensate for the high fuel costs, she says, but her clients said they’d stop buying from her if she did.
Instead, she’s decreased her bushera production. And following last year’s ban on charcoal and firewood production in northern Uganda, which has driven prices even higher, she’s unsure what she’ll do for cooking fuel. “I am worried for the future of my business,” she says.
Over the past few years, the Ugandan government introduced incentives to lure people away from using charcoal and firewood for their cooking and toward cleaner fuels. In 2020, the government waived the value-added tax on cooking gas, and a year later it implemented bulk rates for electricity where customers can buy large amounts for lower prices. Last year it began distributing gas cylinders to residents in Mukono and Wakiso districts in central Uganda near Kampala, the capital.
But despite these efforts, around 94% of Ugandan households still cook with charcoal and firewood, also known as biomass. Then in June 2023, President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni signed an executive order banning commercial charcoal production and tree-cutting for firewood in northern Uganda, the leading supplier of charcoal in the country. The ban — an attempt to stop deforestation and reduce carbon emissions — made charcoal and firewood scarce and sparked price increases nationwide.
This left people like Arineitwe in a bind. They are unable or unwilling to switch to different and cleaner cooking methods because the startup costs are unaffordable, the options confusing, and the cooking techniques unfamiliar and incompatible with traditional Ugandan cooking. At the same time, they can’t afford enough charcoal and firewood to fulfill their needs.
They are in limbo and, as a result, are forced to slow down their businesses or halt them altogether. Alternative fuels are too costly, Arineitwe says. The prices of charcoal and firewood are double what they used to be, she says, but it is still less expensive for her to use them than to switch to electricity, which is accessible in her region.
With the price hike, it costs her 14,000 shillings (3.5 dollars) to boil the 60 liters (nearly 16 gallons) of water a day that she needs to make her bushera. In contrast, if she were to use electricity, it would cost her over 50,000 shillings (13 dollars) per day to boil 20 liters of water (about 5 gallons), just one-third of the amount she needs, because she can’t afford to buy enough to take advantage of bulk rates.
Before the price increase, she made a profit of around 30,000 shillings (7 dollars) per week, or 120,000 shillings (31 dollars) a month selling bushera. “The meager profits I make in the business will all be spent on electricity,” she says. She could buy an electric pressure cooker, which uses electricity more efficiently, but they are expensive and too small to be practical, she says.
And even if larger cookers were available, she couldn’t afford one. Now she only makes bushera for returning customers when they request it, Arineitwe says, typically for an event. And she asks them to provide the firewood and flour for her to make it.
The government hopes to transition the country away from charcoal and firewood for cooking by 2030, says Solomon Muyita, spokesperson for the Ministry of Energy and Minerals Development. But high costs and distrust of the new methods are a challenge. “The government is pushing for this program in phases since the costs involved still hold most people behind,” Muyita says.
It’s also about changing people’s mindsets, he adds. For example, use of liquefied petroleum gas remains low despite the waived tax, Muyita says. “People do not trust it can cook well their food,” Muyita says about biogas, adding that people also fear gas leaks, which can lead to fires and explosions if not stopped quickly.
This applies to electricity too. A person who cooks matooke — a traditional dish made from green plantains — using firewood and charcoal is used to the dish taking five hours to make. But with an electric pressure cooker, matooke will cook in 20 minutes, says Sarah Babirye, CEO of Uganda National Alliance on Clean Cooking.
Many Ugandans believe matooke cooked in a traditional manner, for hours wrapped in banana leaves, is better and more delicious than matooke thrown in water and cooked for 20 minutes. Jackline Nalule, who operates a local restaurant in Kampala’s Kalerwe suburb that customers call “Ewa Nalu” in Luganda — or “At Nalu’s,” short for Nalule — says that for the four years she’s run the restaurant, her steamed matooke has been what draws customers. “All my customers will run away the moment they taste matooke cooked by electricity or gas,” says Nalule, who strongly believes in culture and traditions.
“The flavor is completely lost when the matooke is not steamed.” The difference is a culture shock, Muyita says. The government has awareness-raising campaigns targeted at changing public misconceptions that new methods are too expensive, dangerous and can’t cook traditional foods.
Ultimately, he adds, the public needs to accept that gas and electricity are cleaner and cheaper fuels for cooking. “They have unwarranted fears,” he says. Until alternative fuels become more accessible and common, people will remain hesitant to use them, says Justine Akumu, senior energy officer of alternative-energy cooking at the Ministry of Energy and Minerals Development.
For now, it isn’t possible for every Ugandan to switch to entirely clean cooking fuel because of the costs, she says. So they should focus on the types of cleaner fuel that are most accessible in their region or more efficient methods of cooking with biomass. For example, she says, people in Lyantonde, a district to the west of Kampala, keep cattle.
They could use biogas made from cow dung. In eastern Uganda, cassava growers could use ethanol made from cassava. People also can adopt more efficient ways of using firewood and charcoal to cook, she adds.
“We advise the public to use better-energy stoves, which don’t allow for fast combustion so that less charcoal is used in cooking,” Akumu says. “And better firewood stoves which will take less wood should replace the original hearth.” Deputy head teacher John Lwanga says St.
Joseph’s Secondary School, located in Nansana, still uses firewood to cook meals for its students, despite the costs. The school feeds three meals a day to over 1,000 students, which would be too expensive with electricity. But parents will have to contribute more money in school dues to purchase firewood because of the price increase, he says.
He’s excited by the idea of using biogas at the school, he says. However, the school needs to figure out the details of a switch, such as how much it would cost and what apparatus they would need. But schools have a lot of human waste that can be turned into fuel, he adds.
“Then waste will cease to be waste,” Lwanga says. The alternatives are confusing, says Ian Migadde, who cooks and sells beans and chapati, a type of flatbread, to evening commuters for their supper. He worries about how much it will cost to switch to a new fuel.
Nearly 15% of his monthly income goes toward paying for electricity to light his home, charge batteries, iron and watch television, he says. He fears his bill will be unaffordable if he starts to cook with it too. He’s heard about the special electricity pricing, but even if he could afford to pay in bulk, he doesn’t think it would be enough.
“I doubt it would take me through the month, given that I must cook 3 kilograms of beans every day,” Migadde says. With charcoal double the price, he says he’s resorted to using broken furniture sold by customers as firewood. But he is sure the supply of furniture parts will run out soon.
He is failing to break even because of the high fuel costs, he says. He is thinking about putting the business on hold until the effects of the ban stabilize, with the hope that the electricity rates will be revised to be more affordable. “I think I will take a break and return to this business when the prices are better,” he says.
****** ***** ✳ At first glance, the branches scratching the surface of Lake Katwe look like a gripping artwork for the way they create different shapes in the water. If, to an outsider’s eye, their arrangement may seem random, for the thousands of artisanal salt miners whose livelihoods depend on the lake, every branch serves a purpose as they are used to mark the borders of their salt pans. “The divisions you see there are plots owned by us,” says Sarah Tinditiina, a salt miner who’s been working here for 13 years.
Tinditiina spends her days scraping the lake bottom for rock salt. “We take long hours in the evaporating water and, because of this, I feel so thirsty.” Located in Kasese district, in western Uganda, Lake Katwe is the top salt-producing lake in the country and a key resource for Uganda’s growing salt production industry, which, according to the United Nations Comtrade database, exported 7.
4 United States dollars’ worth of salt in 2022 to other nations, including Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Sudan. Artisanal mining refers to the manual extraction of minerals using basic tools by workers not officially employed by mining companies. The practice to extract salt from Lake Katwe is a centuries-old tradition dating to pre-colonial times.
Many salt pans lining the lake’s shores have belonged to the same families for decades and were passed down from one generation to the next. In recent years, the lake has attracted an influx of job seekers, with an estimated 10,600 miners — mostly women — working here today. This represents a nearly 50% increase from a decade ago.
With weekly earnings ranging between 40,000 Ugandan shillings (10 dollars) and 1 million shillings (272 dollars), salt miners see the promise of a livelihood in the lake. But many also worry about their health. Due to a lack of toilet facilities, salt miners immersed in waters for long periods of time are at risk of sewage-borne illnesses, such as typhoid, cholera and diarrhea, according to a 2018 report from the United Nations Development Programme.
The report also found that prolonged exposure to brine can cause inflammation of reproductive organs and may affect miners’ fertility rates. Men reported deformed genitalia, and female miners said they experienced high rates of miscarriage and infertility. Local medical experts interviewed by Global Press Journal, however, expressed skepticism about a correlation between salt water and low fertility rates.
“The miners have a phobia that their parts will be affected but there is nothing that happens,” says Paul Kaduyu, a gynecologist at Mengo Hospital, in Kampala. Medical experts, however, confirm that brine exposure can lead to skin conditions that can be exacerbated by a lack of proper treatment, causing skin ulcers and infections. When the Ugandan government approved the Mining and Minerals Act in 2022 to regulate the work of artisanal miners, Lake Katwe’s salt miners were hopeful it would address their concerns.
Under the new law, the minister of Energy, Mining and Mineral Development may prescribe measures to make artisanal miners’ work safer, and so salt miners expected the government to facilitate access to protective gear. But this never happened for the thousands of salt miners who, like Tinditiina, are working in Lake Katwe without proper mining licenses. Many of them say the government didn’t consider their health concerns.
Without proper equipment, miners have mostly continued to rely on improvised protections. While men wear condoms or tie polythene bags around their genitals, female miners wear sanitary pads or smear mixed cassava dough on their genitalia before entering the salty waters. “For the men, tying the penis for over seven hours tampers with the blood circulation in the vessels, which itself causes problems,” says Dr.
Joel Mirembe, senior medical officer at Mulago National Referral Hospital. Because women may not be able to afford pads every day, they often opt for old clothes, which may not be hygienic enough and could act as a “breeding ground for infections,” he adds. In recent years, after news that salt miners were using condoms and pads as protective gear spread across the country, tourists and journalists began flocking to the lake.
“It became like a form of amusement for people to come and watch people who work with condoms on and women who pad themselves every workday of their lives,” says Nicholas Kagongo, a former leader at the Lake Katwe Cooperative Society, an organization representing local salt miners. This was displeasing to the artisans, so they chose to hide the practice and not talk about it. Ibrahim Bahati and Ronald Aguma sit on the pavement, demarcating their pans.
They’ve been working in the lake for 25 years and 10 years, respectively. As a welcome gesture, Aguma extends a hand in greeting. “They are lies,” he says, referring to the use of condoms by male salt miners as protection.
But he acknowledges the health risks of working in the lake. He thought the new law would improve their conditions. “We thought they would think of us.
We go through too much toil, and we risk our lives,” Aguma says. “We enter the lake by 9 a.m.
and come out by 5 p.m. Naturally our body is shriveled because of too long a spell in water.
” He displays the effect the salt has had on him — some old and fresh cuts on his elbows — while Bahati, who has worked here longer, shows off a patchwork of scars that run down his legs. “I started with not a single scar, but see what my legs have become,” Bahati says. To protect fresh wounds from the brine, miners use a cheap adhesive meant for metals that is unsuitable for human skin and may cause skin, eye and respiratory irritation.
Seka Abdullakarim, who has worked here for four years, plans to quit his job out of concerns for his health. “I need to protect my life. I will need a generation under my name,” he says, referring to his desire to have children.
When asked about what gear he uses to protect himself from the brine, he smiles and dodges the question by wading into the water, causing a ripple effect. Margaret Akol, who has worked for 20 years as a leader of Women Salt Miners, a local organization representing women salt miners, disapproves of the miners’ reticence to talk about their working conditions. “Embarrassing as it is, if a problem is kept hidden, there will be no solution,” she says.
Meanwhile, the government lacks adequate resources to improve salt miners’ working conditions, says Vincent Kedi, assistant commissioner for licensing and administration at the Directorate of Geological Survey and Mines. While medical professionals say condoms and pads can cause skin irritations and infections, Kedi says the government plans to start distributing these improvised protections. “The condoms and pads have kept them safe,” he says.
Kedi says some of the miners have reported having their uterus removed and claimed it was connected to brine exposure. Global Press Journal could not independently verify this claim and the gynecologists interviewed for this article say it is highly unlikely that brine exposure may lead to uterus removal. Tinditiina says three of her fellow salt miners have had their uteruses removed.
“Our problems are more than what people think. It does not stop at our skin peeling or itching,” Tinditiina says. “Some of us have had the misfortune of losing our wombs.
” Not too far from where the miners work stands an abandoned salt factory, towering over the lake. It operated for less than one year in the early 1980s. Kagongo says that the building machinery could not withstand the waters’ corrosive effects.
“The metal pipes used to drill the salt corroded in a month,” he says. For salt miners, the abandoned factory serves as another painful reminder of the consequences the lake’s waters may have on their bodies. “If salt can destroy a machine in one year,” Bahati asks, “then what harm can it do to a human being who works in it for over 40 years?”.
