JST/JICA Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development（SATREPS）
Risk-based Participatory WASH Planning and Citizen-data WASH Statistics for African Peri-urban Settlements」(SPLASH Project)
Project leader
Associate Professor Hidenori Harada
Partner country
Zambia：University of Zambia/ Center of Economic and Social Research, University of Zambia/ Integrated Water Resource Management Centre, University of Zambia/ Lusaka City Council – Department of Public Health, Lusaka Water and Sanitation Company
Background
Water and sanitation are one of the basic human needs, essential for a healthy and comfortable life, and their realization has become a global issue. In peri-urban low-income settlements (compounds) spreading around Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, inadequate water and sanitation are an urgent problem and are considered one of the main causes of sporadic cholera outbreaks. Water supply is unstable, and people typically collect water at shared yard taps and store it in buckets at home. However, the water becomes contaminated after collection due to various transmissions stemming from unsanitary living conditions. To protect water and achieve healthy living, proactive hygiene practices by residents are essential alongside infrastructure development by the government. But its realization is not easy. People do NOT have a sanitary toilet BUT a mobile phone.
Overview of Activities
SPLASH aims to reevaluate the importance of water and sanitation not by “taught” its significance, but by having people “experienced” it firsthand, thereby creating a resident-led movement for water and sanitation improvement. At the core of this initiative is a resident-participatory risk visualization workshop. Participants collect samples from their living spaces based on their own concerns, see germs through simple testing, and develop improvement measures based on the visualized risks. Through these activities, they aim for residents who recognize contamination in their living spaces (such as water, hands, or floors) to reframe environmental sanitation issues—which they often blame on administrative negligence—as their own responsibility, leading to autonomous improvements. This project will develop an app to support this process while simultaneously collecting inspection data from residents through the app. It will then transform this data into big data to create water and sanitation statistics.
These can be described as a process where residents use scientific methods as tools to reinterpret their own lifeworld (the integration of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge), rather than researchers unilaterally imparting scientific knowledge. Furthermore, the creation of these citizen science-based water and sanitation statistics also represents an attempt to connect micro-level observations by residents to macro-level urban sanitation policy.
The project conducts diverse research spanning the sciences and engineering to the humanities and social sciences to support these activities. In addition to equipping laboratories at the University of Zambia, they are conducting research on understanding residents’ water and sanitation practices, understanding the social relationships among diverse actors involved in local water and sanitation, understanding the formation process of local communities, understanding the evolution of water and sanitation policy responses to cholera, conducting genetic analysis of water contamination, analyzing the spread of contamination and risk structures, and developing algorithms to detect and correct errors in residents’ inspection data.
Social Implementation
This project is positioned as a technical cooperation project (ODA) by JICA. With support from JICA, the Government of Japan, and the Government of Zambia, it aims for social implementation in three unplanned settlements in Lusaka. They collaborate with the University of Zambia as the core institution, alongside the Lusaka City Public Health Department and the Lusaka Water and Sanitation Corporation. It also collaborates with various local actors, including district development committee members, water and sanitation extension workers, community health workers, local NGOs, and residents. In addition, it is conducted as joint research with several Japanese universities and collaborates with domestic and international NGOs, private companies, and others
Link
The page of Zambia Field station
