EAST African Community (EAC) member countries are under pressure to put up funds for joint environment projects especially with regard to the Lake Victoria Basin (LVB).

This situation was in evidence when Treasury permanent secretary Dr Natu El-Maamry Mwamba appealed to EAC partner states to strive to become independent by strengthening the collection of domestic revenue instead of depending on loans and grants from abroad.

The remarks were made on the sidelines of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, where green growth strategies are being discussed to help bolster economic growth and social service provision in an environmentally sound framework.

She asked EAC states to join forces and put up robust strategies to increase internal revenue collection in order to facilitate smooth implementation of development projects.

This appeal was seen to be aligned with efforts of the World Bank as the main lender in regional environmental programmes, where reliance on multilateral agencies and other donor countries is noticeably high.

A recent wrote up of the World Bank in that regard does not directly indicate intent to reduce funding but it says that “taking heed of lessons from the multi-sector review – including on the need to be selective and the importance of a focus on people and livelihoods for sustainability of results, the World Bank Water Global Practice will now engage with the LVB countries on one of the key drivers of lake deterioration – the discharge of untreated human waste.”

Despite support by the Korea Green Growth Trust Fund (KGGTF), and building on the Green, Resilient, and Inclusive Development and Citywide Inclusive Sanitation approaches anchored in World Bank lending, EAC states are being asked to do more.

The write up says the lender seeks engagement that will focus on developing a regional strategy for providing inclusive sanitation services in cities and towns that at present release untreated human waste into the lake.

The KGGTF year-9 grant supporting lake-wide inclusive sanitation for improving water quality in the Lake Victoria Basin will focus on working with the private sector to create low-skill green jobs along the sanitation service chain, it said.

The key element is “prioritizing resource recovery and reuse, and integrating green and gray technologies to contribute to a greener recovery in the post-Covid 19 lending and adaptation situation,” it asserted.

The Treasury executive said that EA countries, like many developing countries, make every effort to implement their budgets using domestic revenue, along with investing in development projects without solely relying on loans from abroad.

“Despite these efforts, still the EA countries face several challenges to achieve their respective goals compared to many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the tax-to-GDP ratio stood at 13.7 percent in 2023 compared to the 16.5 percent Sub-Saharan African average,” she added.