As the Climate Changes, Zambia Must Redefine Sanitation

Every rainy season, cholera claims lives in Zambia, lives that could be saved by something as simple as a toilet. As the world marks World Toilet Day for 2025, Zambia finds itself confronting a crisis that is as familiar as it is urgent. The annual event, established by the United Nations to inspire action toward achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 (clean water and sanitation for all by 2030), reminds us that sanitation is not merely an issue of comfort; it is about public health, human dignity and climate resilience.

This year’s theme, “Sanitation in a Changing World”, carries the tagline “We’ll Always Need the Toilet.” It highlights the unchanging importance of sanitation even as the world around us transforms under the pressures of climate change, ageing infrastructure and underinvestment. To meet the global sanitation goal, the world must move five times faster than it is doing today. That statistic alone should jolt us into action.

For Zambia, the message could not be timelier. Each rainy season brings with it the spectre of cholera outbreaks and other waterborne diseases, particularly in densely populated urban settlements where toilets are inadequate, waste management is poor, and drainage systems fail under heavy rains. The situation reflects not only infrastructural gaps but also deep-seated inequalities in access to basic services. The link between sanitation and health could not be clearer: without safe toilets and clean water, cholera will continue to resurface, undermining decades of public health progress.

Yet the sanitation challenge is no longer just about hygiene, it is also about climate change. Floods, unpredictable rainfall, and prolonged droughts are making it harder to maintain safe and sustainable sanitation systems. Floodwaters can contaminate wells and pit latrines, spreading disease, while droughts reduce the water available for hygiene. Climate variability is also compromising the durability and quality of sanitation infrastructure, particularly in resource-limited settings where systems are already fragile. In short, climate change is making it harder to keep toilets functional and safe.

As global leaders gather for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Zambia and other developing nations must ensure that sanitation is not sidelined in climate negotiations. Sanitation and climate change are intimately linked in two directions. On one hand, poor sanitation contributes to climate change: the unsafe disposal of faecal matter produces greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide, adding to global emissions. On the other hand, climate variability: floods, rising temperatures and extreme weather, erodes the very sanitation systems needed to contain those emissions and protect human health.

Therefore, the outcomes of COP30 should include stronger recognition of sanitation as part of the climate–health–resilience agenda. Climate adaptation frameworks must support countries like Zambia to build resilient, low-emission, and future-ready toilets that can withstand floods, droughts and population pressures. These solutions are not just technical, they are moral imperatives that address both environmental integrity and human dignity.

Encouragingly, there are funding mechanisms that can help. The Green Climate Fund (GCF), the Adaptation Fund, and emerging loss and damage finance instruments offer opportunities to channel resources towards water and sanitation projects that are both climate-smart and community-driven. Zambia’s policymakers should seize these opportunities to develop proposals that integrate sanitation into climate action plans, ensuring that access to safe toilets becomes part of the broader narrative on resilience and sustainable development.

Globally, momentum is building. As of early November 2025, about 64 countries have submitted their nationally determined contributions (NDC) 3.0, the “2035-aligned” NDCs under the Paris Agreement, demonstrating growing ambition to address climate change. Zambia can follow suit by embedding sanitation and hygiene priorities within its own climate commitments, recognising that a clean toilet is also a climate solution.

World Toilet Day is a call to rethink how we approach one of humanity’s oldest and most basic needs. Toilets symbolise civilisation, dignity, and progress, but in a changing climate, they also represent resilience and adaptation. For Zambia, the path forward demands more than commemorations; it requires investment, innovation, and political will.

As the climate changes, we must redefine sanitation, not as a peripheral concern, but as a central pillar of sustainable development. Because, indeed, we’ll always need the toilet.

Silhouette of a Woman

The rain fell in steady iron sheets, turning the familiar streets into mirrors of gray. She stood at the threshold of the Chilenje house she had called home for the last three years of her marriage, a suitcase in one hand and the weight of a thousand unsaid words in the other. She didn’t slam the door. She simply pulled it shut with a quiet click that felt louder than any argument she had ever had.

Her mother named her Towera, the shiny and beautiful one! 

Inside the house and after what felt like 40 days and 40 nights, Andrew would wake eventually to an empty bed and a note she hadn’t bothered to write. 

"What new things were left to say?" she thought. "Every road that we knew doesn’t lead me home anymore."

She had tried. God, how she had tried. Late-night talks that dissolved into gaslighting and blackmailing or promises whispered in the dark that evaporated by morning. The relationship which had started with a barrage of love bombings, had quickly become controlling. 

The slow erosion of trust created a chasm that even brushing past each other in the kitchen felt like colliding with a stranger. The love that once filled the rooms had thinned into echoes, hollow repetitions of old conversations that no longer reached either of them.

She had become, somewhere along the way, an outline. A shape Andrew could recognize from a distance and command without ever having to see her face. A silhouette didn't argue. A silhouette had no inside to bruise. He had loved her edges and never once asked what was inside them.

In the beginning, she thought marriage was a destination. Well, at least that's how she was socialised. Now she understood it had only ever been a path, and theirs had cracked beyond repair. 

She packed what she could: clothes, two of her favourite books that still brought her comfort and the small bundle of savings she had quietly set aside for rainy days. 

And it was raining.

She left behind what she should: the wedding photos, the shared dreams and the version of herself that had shrunk to fit inside Andrew's expectations.

The Nyati and Muramba Roads were empty as she walked, drizzles soaking through her coat. Here was the X Factor Bar at Chris Corner where they used to meet after work, laughing over bottles of Mosi. Just across the Mosi-o-tunya Road, there was the park bench where he once proposed with nervous hands and hopeful eyes. Now it all felt so cold, like mendacious tales of adventure that her grandfather used to tell. The memories played in her mind but no longer ached. They simply existed, detached, like scenes from someone else’s life.

"I don’t feel regret," she thought, pulling her collar higher. "Just a silhouette of the woman I was before all of this."

She had spent years trying to fix what was broken, believing that enough love, enough patience, enough sacrifice could mend the fractures. But some things don’t mend. They only teach you how to stop bleeding. Every word they said now just echoed instead of connecting. Andrew's little games marinated in the silences used as weapons, the promises that never materialized and the way he made her doubt her own worth. They all now held no power anymore. She didn’t need his name. She didn’t need the role she had played for so long.

Her footsteps carried her toward the bus station at the corner of Chilimbulu and Mosi-o-tunya Road, opposite Lewanika Mall. With each step, the broken track of their marriage stretched behind her. She wasn’t looking back. Something’s never last, and theirs had reached its end.

As the first bus pulled away from the curb, Towera pressed her forehead against the cool window. The street lights along the Burma Road blurred into streaks of silver as the bus started its journey towards town. 

"I’m gone without a trace," she realized. "No time to replace what we lost." 

If Andrew called her name tomorrow. Or next month. Or years from now, it wouldn’t be the same woman who would answer. That woman had already begun to unfold.

The rain continued to fall as the bus carried her into the shades of gray beyond the city limits. For the first time in years, Towera breathed deeply. The shiny and beautiful one was learning how to glint again. And today, she had chosen survival.

"Till death do us part," she sighed. It had taken her years to hear the line for what it was. A slogan. And no one should ever die or sacrifice their happiness for a slogan.

She was finally walking away from her childhood dream, terminating her membership from the 'Shipikisha Club.' She had left as a silhouette. Somewhere between Chilenje and the City Centre, she was beginning to take shape again. And for the first time in three years, restarting her life didn't feel like exile. It felt like beginning.