13 water monitoring machines installed on Lake Victoria, Nile
Officials from the Nile Basin Initiative and the Ministry of Water and Environment commission newly installed digital hydrometer monitoring machines in Lake Victoria, Jinja Pier Station, Jinja City. PHOTO/DENIS EDEMA
Thirteen hydrometer monitoring systems have been installed on Lake Victoria and on the banks of River Nile to provide timely information of the water quantity, level and requirement for generating electricity among others.
The hydrometer was installed by the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) which has presence in ten countries that share Lake Victoria and River Nile, including Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, the Rwanda Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan.
The Director of Water Resources and Management, who represented the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Water and Environment, Dr Callist Tindimugaya, said the equipment is “modern and digital.”
“The machine will guide us on if the water level is very high, how much we can release, and if it is very low,” Mr Tindimugaya said on Monday during the handover of the equipment at Jinja Pier in Jinja City.
He added that the equipment monitors the quality of the water, the amount of water, how much should be discharged for electricity at Nalubaale and Kiira, at the same time determines how much water is needed to be released to other NBI states.
According to Dr Tindimugaya, the machine gives information about the water level on Lake Victoria every minute and this information is automatically reflected to the rest of the NBI partnership countries at the same time, unlike the old manual machines where there is delay in sharing information.
Previously, the person deployed to read the level of water travels every day to Jinja and when it rains, that means information on the water on Lake Victoria will not be gotten that particular day; but with the new machines, it is automated into systems there and then.
Dr Tindimugaya further explained that Jinja is one of the “most important stations” of all that controls all the water discharged for electricity generation and to other countries.
The Executive Director NBI, Dr Florence Grace Adongo, hailed the development as a value addition to the old type of equipment that was being used to determine the level of the water on Lake Victoria.
“An early increase of water level warning can be detected by the modern equipment to prevent natural disasters like flooding that happened in 2020, affecting many people,” she said.
Dr Adongo said previously, only Uganda provided information on water usage from the NBI, and of the 13 of the machines installed, Uganda will have five, South Sudan two, and six in Rwanda, adding that a total of 160 will be put in the different parts of the NBI partner states.
