Mobilizing for Adequate, Accessible, and Affordable (A3) Water and Sanitation Services

In addressing water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Sub-Saharan Africa, the research community often tends to focus on accessiblity and adequacy of services in rural areas - and increasingly in urban areas. However, the dichotomy of spatial typologies belies the true diversity of neighborhoods across this urbanizing continent and the fractured or decentralized nature of infrastructures in such shifting landscapes.

This project seeks to extend the current knowledge frontier connecting geographies, services, socio-economics, and health through promoting a more comprehensive and textured "triple lens" of inquiry that eschews brush-stroke rural or urban categories and instead examines at the neighborhood scale how affordability is conceived and determined - both from provider standpoints and from the user end - in addition to studying accessibility and adequacy in defining and addressing WASH challenges in Mozambique.

During the summer of 2013, a team of MIT students traveled with me to the Mozambican capital, Maputo, to collaborate with my colleague, Professor Anselmo Cani and his students from the University of Eduardo Mondlane (UEM), in addition to local youth partners, to survey households and to open-source map neighborhood resources in KaTembe, Mozambique (follow our work here). KaTembe is a peri-urban district of Maputo, and is slated for large redevelopment projects following the construction of a long highly anticipated bridge connecting this part of Maputo with the central city over the bay. Our work will be used to ascertain linkages between current water and sanitation provisions, affordability concerns of income-poor residents and service providers, and extant neighborhood-level resources related to community health. Ultimately, the objective of this project is to use data and its visualization as a potent reference for building a local advocacy strategy for improved services that the UEM and MIT team will work on together in KaTembe and Cambridge.

The MIT-UEM team wishes to very gratefully acknowledge and thank for their support MIT's MISTI Global Seed Fund program, the Public Service Center, and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, in addition to the Rector of the University of Eduardo Mondlane and the Faculty of Architecture and Physical Planning.