This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

An Australian project that aims to revolutionise water delivery and sanitation in urban slums has been awarded $27m in funding.

Prof Rebekah Brown, the director of the Sustainable Development Institute at Melbourne’s Monash University, has been awarded a $14m research grant by the Wellcome Trust’s Our Planet Our Health awards in the UK. A further $13m from the Asian Development Bank would cover infrastructure and construction costs.

The large, multidisciplinary project – with contribution from Stanford and Emory universities in the US – aims to revolutionise water delivery to slums in urban areas, and will help rebuild 24 settlements in Indonesia and Fiji over five years.



More than 600 groups from around the world applied for funding from Our Planet Our Health, of which only four were successful. Brown’s study was one of only two relating to urbanisation.

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Josh Frydenberg, Australia’s minister for the environment, was due to announce the funding at Monash University on Tuesday morning.

Josh Frydenberg (@JoshFrydenberg) Great to join @MonashUni for the $14m announcement of @wellcometrust research project on urban water management pic.twitter.com/gTf42InodP

Brown said she and her team were “thrilled and so privileged” to receive the money. The project’s aim was to address challenges in ensuring access to water and sanitation for the world’s urban poor, which, Brown said, now cost more than $100bn in global aid.

“We’re hoping we’ll be able to give a blueprint [of] how to do water and sanitation better, in a more sustainable way ... We want to be able to influence that so it’s spent in the optimum way.”

Brown said the dominant “big-pipes approach” of delivering water from reservoirs did not suit urban slums because it was expensive, wasteful and difficult to introduce in informal settlements.

Her team would trial Australian innovations in self-contained and decentralised infrastructure to capture rainwater, treat contamination and clean up waste. The low-energy process would also create another water source that could be used for for irrigation.

The success of the project would be measured by the health of village residents – particularly the gastrointestinal health of children under five – and that of the surrounding environment.

Twelve villages – six in Fiji and six in Indonesia – would be developed to test the proposed approach; a further 12 villages, nearby and of a similar size, would be used as controls. At the end of the five years, the control villages would be rehabilitated as well. Up to 7,200 people would be resident in the 24 settlements.

Construction in the test settlements would not begin until year three, but teams would travel to Indonesia at the end of January and to Fiji in February to finalise the site selection.

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Fiji and Indonesia were chosen because of their population density, culture, climate and urban infrastructure. “Some of their urban settlements and slums are some of the most vulnerable in the region,” said Brown, pointing to flooding and rising sea levels caused by climate change as well as systemic poverty and inequality.

“Typically, at its worst, there’s no running water, there’s no drainage, the children are stunted, people are sick. They don’t have the opportunity to access the economy to improve their own prosperity – they’re trapped in the cycle.”

Those local governments were also keen to partner for the project. “We’ve got top medical scientists, architects, engineers, social scientists, economists, working together side by side to improve the sustainability and rehabilitation of these slums from these multidisciplinary perspectives,” said Brown.

“Everyone on the team of course wants scientific excellence but we all really want to make a difference and get to the guts of this global challenge: how are we going to provide adequate sanitation for the global poor.”

With the world’s population due to exceed 9.3 billion by 2050, and with much of that growth centred around cities, Brown said the project was about meeting the needs of the future.

“The poor are living in urban areas in these informal settlements without access to services we all take for granted.



“If you can’t address these basic needs of water, shelter and food, you can’t get out of that cycle of poverty ... We are dealing with one of the fundamental steps that’s needed to progressively access the economy, to improve these communities’ prosperity through the provision of infrastructure.”