A TOTAL of 114 households are expected to be moved from Gitikinyoni area of Nyarugenge district, to make way for Kigali city’s first central sewerage system, The New Times has learnt.

This was revealed in an exclusive interview with Water and Sanitation Cooperation (WASAC)’s Manager for water and sanitation infrastructure planning, Dominique Murekezi.

Murekezi said that the project, which is in two phases began with a Resettlement Action Plan whereby one of the activities was to determine if there was need to expropriate households and determine the numbers.

"A full study was done to determine the people who are going to be impacted by the project, their economic and social status and how best we can minimise the impact. This started in December 2018 and so far, we have identified 114 families,” he said.

Murekezi said that the expropriation process itself has phases; the first one involving the sewer network pipelines collecting waste water and the second will involve where the waste water treatment plant will be located.

"We divided the expropriation into phases to ease our task. For now, we are doing the expropriation for the waste water treatment plant at Gitikinyoni and we are at 60 percent progress.

We are waiting for the contractor to be on board so that the studies can be updated to have the final route of the pipelines before we can start the expropriation,” he said.

Juvenal Mukurarinda, a Sanitation Senior Engineer at the Ministry of infrastructure, told The New Times recently that necessary studies have been conducted, including the feasibility studies and environmental impact assessment.

Mukurarinda said construction of Kigali’s first waste-water network and treatment plant will improve health, reduce pollution and carbon emissions, as well as make Kigali an even better place to live and work.

He explained that the project components are to construct sewer network (tertiary, secondary and primary sewer networks) of 89 kilometres and wastewater treatment plant at the Gitikinyoni area, in Nyarugenge District.

The first phase of the project, he said, will cover the Central Business District (CBD), Muhima and Kiyovu. The wastewater treatment plant will have the capacity to treat liquid wastes at 12,000 cubic metres per day.

Financing

The Government mid last year secured a €96 million loan (approximately 98bn) from the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the European Investment Bank (EIB).

Breaking down the cost, the Minister for Infrastructure, Claver Gatete, told parliament last year that the project will be funded with €45m from the IEB, €43m from the AfDB, and an additional €8m from the Government.

According to the Ministry of Infrastructure, the Government has an ambitious target to reach 100 per cent access to sanitation services by 2024.