Broken Boreholes Are a Maintenance Failure, Not a Drilling Failure
Districts count new water points. Communities count working ones, and the two numbers keep diverging.
By Prossy Nabukenya..Uganda.5 min read
Uganda. 10 June 2026.
AccountabilityWater & Sanitation
A borehole is commissioned once and maintained continuously. That is why the commissioning photograph is a poor guide to whether a village has water three years later.
The two-thousand-shilling problem
Most breakdowns are small: a worn seal, a cracked rising main, a missing bolt. They become permanent when there is no collection arrangement to pay for the part and no trained mechanic within reach.
"
The pump did not die. It waited eight months for a spare that costs less than a bag of cement.
Water user committee member, central Uganda
Districts with a paid hand-pump mechanic on call report far higher functionality than those relying on voluntary committees alone.
Field Dispatches
Get our weekly regional audits in your inbox
One email a week from the Kampala, Busia, Hoima and Jinja desks. What we checked, what we saw at the site, and what is still not adding up.
Functionality rates the commissioning ceremony does not capture
District water offices report new boreholes drilled each year as a headline achievement, but functionality surveys conducted periodically by the Ministry of Water and Environment consistently show a meaningful share of existing water points out of service at any given time, a figure that rarely features in the same announcements as new construction.
Water user committees, which are typically volunteer bodies responsible for collecting a small monthly fee to fund repairs, vary enormously in how consistently they collect and how quickly they can mobilise funds when a pump fails. Districts that instead maintain a paid hand-pump mechanic on a standing retainer report faster repair turnaround and fewer points falling permanently out of use.
"
A committee can collect the money in principle. Whether they actually collect it every month is a different story, and the pump does not wait politely for the difference.
District water officer, central Uganda
The Ministry has piloted a professionalised mechanic model in several districts, pairing trained mechanics with a spare parts supply chain stocked at district level rather than requiring villages to source parts individually. Early results from those pilots have shown improved functionality where the model has been sustained with funding.
The metric district officers argue should feature in every water sector report is not boreholes drilled in a given year, but the share of existing water points still functioning. That number better reflects what households actually experience.
Evidence & documents
Every claim above is checked against the records below. Open each one to see where it comes from.
Prossy Nabukenya reports on water, sanitation and public health in Kampala's densest parishes, with a focus on how utility policy is experienced at household level.
