Faculty Chat: Gabriella Carolini on clean water and sanitation in Africa

Professor Jocelyn Elise Crowley recently sat down for a chat with Gabriella Carolini, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Policy Development , about her work on sanitation and clean water in Africa. 

Dr. Carolini has been studying and researching urban and peri-urban development challenges and opportunities in the global South since beginning her graduate studies in 2000.  Her doctoral research on the nexus of fiscal policy, accounting reforms, and slum upgrading was based in Brazil, and since 2009 has been researching South-South advanced fiscal reforms and their dynamic relationship with public investments and basic service planning in vulnerable neighborhoods in Mozambique. She is returning to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, and later traveling to East Timor for her sabbatical in the fall of 2011, where she will continue studying how fiscal policies interact with city planning to shape urban and peri-urban futures.

EJB: What is WASH and why is it an important public policy issue?
Professor Carolini:  WASH is an acronym for Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene.  Over 2 billion people in the world today do not use improved sanitation facilities, and almost one million do not use improved drinking water.  When you compare these numbers to, for example, the U.S. population (~300 million) or to any number of other serious health challenges across the globe, it is quite easy to see why WASH concerns are one of the most important policy and planning issues today.  Furthermore, heavy environmental health burdens related to WASH in low-income contexts, particularly in the global South, have multiplicative impacts on the health of a country’s population, on its economy, and on the functioning of a politically engaged society. 

EJB: Why study these issues in relation to Mozambique?
Professor Carolini:  Low-income countries like Mozambique face significant environmental health challenges at the household and community level, with serious implications for quality of life and economic growth potential.  In addition, Mozambique – and in particular the country’s southern provinces, including its capital city of Maputo – experiences serious flooding and other climate-related vulnerabilities with impact on WASH.  Maputo is also home to a significant international development community.  The prevalence of the development “industry” – represented by development banks, bilateral aid agencies, international and local NGOs, private foundations, research enterprises, etc. – in Maputo makes it an ideal site to study how internationally championed fiscal policy reforms are impacting the capacity of city planning functions to attend to WASH-related basic service needs of vulnerable communities.

EJB: What did you find after you completed your work in Mozambique? 
Professor Carolini:  My work in Mozambique is ongoing, but my pilot household survey affirmed that WASH concerns represent serious challenges even within the capital city, which otherwise boasts the country’s most advanced amenities and services.  I work in KaTembe, a municipal district that is a part of Maputo city and located across the bay from the city’s main center.  It is a district with a decidedly rural feel, despite being within the capital city’s administration, and hosts a mixture of vulnerabilities across the spectrum of WASH-related services.  Based on my research there, I argue that accessibility, affordability, adequacy and awareness concerns – or what I call A4 – are key lenses through which we can better understand WASH challenges faced by communities living in such vulnerable peri-urban areas.  These challenges are typically aggregated in international health statistics, and thus the texture of diverse settlement typologies within urban and rural areas is lost.  My study aims to contribute to the building out of our knowledge frontier on peri-urban realities – in other words, the specific obstacles to quality-of-life improvements in neighborhoods surrounding major cities where the cost of living is high, multiple poverty indicators are growing, and population growth is expected to be greatest. 

EJB: How can your work inform better public policy in the future?