Lusaka Sanitation Project — World Bank-Financed Sewer Upgrading for Zambia's Capital

Between 2015 and 2024, Zambia's Lusaka Water and Sanitation Company (LWSC) used a $65 million World Bank IDA credit — plus $3.5 million in Government of Zambia counterpart funding and $390,000 in technical assistance from the Global Water Security & Sanitation Partnership — to rehabilitate and extend sewer infrastructure across priority sewersheds in Lusaka, including the Manchinchi and Ngwerere catchments serving the city's dense peri-urban settlements.

The project added over 2,200 new household sewer connections, rehabilitated or built 117 km of sewer lines, constructed 3,500 improved on-site sanitation facilities, and built the Manchinchi Fecal Sludge Treatment Plant, which brought 264,000 people access to improved fecal sludge management.

The project exceeded its own targets: more than 345,000 residents (against a target of 305,000) gained access to improved sanitation, half of them women. Utility responsiveness improved sharply too: the share of sewer-blockage complaints resolved within 48 hours rose from 28% to 100%.

The project sits within Zambia's wider, still-expanding Lusaka Sanitation Programme (an estimated $300 million effort co-financed by the World Bank, African Development Bank, EU and KfW). Even on its own terms, though, the Lusaka Sanitation Project reached only about a sixth of Lusaka District's roughly 2.2 million residents, and its own resettlement action plan documents acknowledge construction encroaching on peri-urban land — vegetable gardens and boundary walls — used informally by residents along the works corridor. Large informal settlements elsewhere in the city remain largely outside the upgraded network, underlining that this is a well-executed but partial answer to Lusaka's sanitation gap, not a city-wide fix.