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{
    "id": 398808,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/398808/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 84,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Ongoro",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 125,
        "legal_name": "Elizabeth Ongoro Masha",
        "slug": "elizabeth-ongoro"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Mr. Speaker, Sir. I stand to support this Motion. We know that water is life. Our Constitution, under the Bill of Rights, recognises that every child has a right to life. By extension, therefore, every child in Kenya has a right to keep on drinking clean water and to have some for other uses. Our country is very unique. Perennially, we have two problems; that is, drought and flooding. This happens in the same country. We know that around a certain time, people living in certain regions, for instance, near the Kano plains of Nyanza, have to migrate to the uplands because it will be flooded. However, in a few short months, the same people experience drought. In one part of the country, you may be experiencing perennial drought while in another part, we have floods throughout. This begs for answers as to why, 50 years after Independence, we have not come up with a broad policy initiative that can compel the national Government, in collaboration with the county governments, to put in place initiatives of water harvesting. Some counties like Turkana and others which have sufficient rainfall throughout the year can harvest enough water to sell to other counties if need be. Currently, we have multi-sectoral policies spread in every other department of the government. In the past Government, if you wanted to deal with issues concerning water, you had to refer to the policies from the Ministry Water and Irrigation, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Forestry and Natural Resources. All these Ministries had something to do with water. All we need is a platform that conducts a study even before we come up with new policies. The existing policies spread in several sectors, departments and Ministries of this country should be consolidated into national water policy that can then be given to the counties for implementation in a structured way. We are experiencing a lot of unfavourable climatic conditions in this country and yet we can still feed ourselves. If only we could harvest water and come up with policies that can allow us to be food sufficient, we could produce even more food. One other thing we need to do, as we support this Motion, is to carry out individual situational analysis per county. Not all counties experience the same challenges. Even those with perennial drought conditions need a situational analysis that will compel the county governments to move in a structured way and implement the policies in a structured format. Apart from that, as I have said before, we need to develop a national policy and strategy framework that can allow us a platform to engage with counties in areas of capacity building, information dissemination and others. This will also allow us to relook into the Vision 2030 which has a very good proposal on this issue. The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}