| Issue/Objective |
The control of faeces is integral for the protection of human health, pointing to the broad reaching health benefits of sanitation. However, today most countries in the Global South prioritize drinking and productive uses of water at the expense of sanitation. This occurs at the same time as there has been significant backsliding in progress made in access to sanitation for the poorest around the world. Sanitation is an urgent problem in the city of Lusaka, Zambia. The city experiences recurring cholera outbreaks as rapid urbanization and climate change bring groundwater contamination and flash floods, allowing the cholera bacteria to reach drinking water sources as wastewater and potable water mix. |
| Methodology/Approach |
This paper draws on fieldwork in Lusaka, including interviews with WASH stakeholders and focus groups with communities most impacted by cholera, to explore the role of global health in promoting both climate resilience and epidemic preparedness. |
| Results |
Given this perennial challenge of waterborne disease, Lusaka is a site of competing visions of the future of wastewater infrastructure as large-scale projects invest simultaneously in centralized and decentralized systems through the building of new sewer connections and the construction of improved pit latrines and faecal sludge management facilities. Using efforts to plan for a new 'cholera season' as an entry, this paper explores how the problem of waste and wastewater are conceptualized by different actors (e.g., engineers, hydrogeologists, community members, health practitioners, policy makers) and how these different visions of waste produce different infrastructural fixes to the challenge of sanitation in the context of increased climatic variability. Efforts to upgrade wastewater infrastructure in a vulnerable informal settlement, and contention over the protection of the last remaining forest and groundwater recharge zone in Lusaka, are drawn into contrast to demonstrate how different visions of both the cause and effect of waste and wastewater shape the potential for a future in Lusaka without cholera. |
| Discussion/Conclusion |
Ultimately, this paper explores how the implementation of different technologies and systems of waste and wastewater management open and close possibilities for rethinking how global health actors can contribute to urban health under increasingly urgent conditions of climate change. |
| Presenters and affiliations |
Hillary Birch York University |
