Around half
a million children die due to diarrhoeal disease.
And we know the major causes of diarrhoeal disease actually are lack of
water and sanitation, particularly in informal settlements.
Providing infrastructure, a big pipe,
it's really very successful in very large city.
But we found this is quite difficult to implement in an informal settlement.
That's why we need to find better solutions.
The first time I visited during the flood
season, this community had difficulty to get out
and they use a bamboo bridge because their water is quite high.
Sometimes the floods were so bad that even the bamboo bridge was covered,
so they would use a raft that was pulled by a rope to pick up the children
in the morning to get them to the road so that they could go to school.
So you can just imagine the level of disruption and of course
the level of ill health associated with that kind of level of flooding.
One of
the uniqueness of this project is that it involves many experts
from epidemiologists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists.
I'm, in fact, an architect, an urban designer, and I was brought in
because we think of designs that address a whole range of challenges
in combination.
The whole project involves 24 communities
and in total 12 in Indonesia, 12 in Fiji.
Batua is the RISE demonstration site in Indonesia.
We wanted to actually test the system
that we were going to apply to these other 12 communities.
We spent about a year to discuss
with this community the best place to put this community septic tank.
What's the best place to put their wetland?
So these are constructed wetland systems
through which we put the effluent water from the toilets.
And the pathogens are in fact
cleaned from the water before it's discharged into the environment.
That's not new.
These green nature based systems have been around for some time.
What is novel here is their use in informal settlements.
We've
been doing monitoring for a bit over a year now
and over the last sort of four months or so,
we have been able to meet the discharge standards for Indonesian government.
So it's working, particularly in the reduction of fecal pathogens,
that is the bugs from poo that are the ones that cause
all the sickness in these communities.
We believe one of the major
determinants of human health is environmental health.
How do we know that there will be less pathogen in environment
as a result of this particular innovative interventions?
That's the question we would like to answer then.
We are now in the process of collecting data.
We're working in 24 communities across Indonesia and Fiji
and we have randomly allocated half the communities to receive
the revitalising intervention
in the first round of upgrades.
Our communities have been
incredibly generous in allowing our field workers
to visit every 3 to 6 months and take samples and do surveys.
There was a period that we couldn't safely go into communities.
We didn't want our workers to bring COVID into communities or to be exposed
if there were outbreaks going on.
COVID has impacted the whole project.
For instance, in 2020 and 2022,
there is no visit from Australia.
And this is actually, I think turned out to be a real benefit.
We have gone from a model that would have had samples
being taken in Fiji or Indonesia or shipped to Australia to be analysed.
We've instead shipped pieces of equipment that were needed in the lab,
really cutting edge pieces of equipment
so that the work can be done in each of the labs that we've set up.
The rigorous study that we're doing now will give us physiological and biological
and scientific evidence that currently doesn't exist.
We can learn from this journey and learn about priorities
for interventions for the future in terms of water and sanitation
management, but also more holistically in how the environments we live in
fundamentally impact on our health.
Currently, there
are approximately 900 million people living in informal settlements.
That number is expected to more than double by 2030.
So in eight years, it's expected to grow to 2 billion
and to 3 billion by 2050.
Centralised service systems have a tiny reach.
We will not meet the needs of informal settlement dwellers going forward
unless we think of different ways to address these challenges.
There are many changes currently now in Batua
this infrastructure we built in the particular community.
It also attracts other projects.
For instance, the local government, they provide
light and also waste collection
and also during the flood seasons they no longer
require that bamboo bridge.