Wastewater Surveillance Planning

The challenge

Wastewater-based epidemiological surveillance has emerged as a powerful early warning tool for infectious disease outbreaks, enabling the detection of pathogens circulating in a population before clinical cases are reported. Yet significant disparities persist between high-income and low-income countries in their capacity to implement, sustain, and act on this type of surveillance. Across Africa, fragmented infrastructure, limited technical expertise, insufficient long-term funding, and the absence of coordinated frameworks continue to constrain the development of functional and integrated WBE systems. At the same time, the continent bears a disproportionate burden of epidemic-prone diseases, underscoring the urgent need for anticipatory, equity-oriented surveillance solutions aligned with One Health principles.

Objectives

• Map existing capacities and needs across African countries through a dedicated Pan-African survey on wastewater and environmental surveillance infrastructure
• Design a coordinated laboratory network for routine and outbreak-response wastewater surveillance, adapted to the diversity of regional and national contexts
• Strengthen local technical capacities through training, methods-sharing, and the pooling of resources among network members
• Develop intersectoral and international collaborations that integrate wastewater surveillance into broader public health and environmental monitoring systems
• Identify sustainable financing pathways to support long-term implementation, from both donor institutions and national public health authorities
• Expand surveillance to a broader range of targets, including bacteria, parasites, and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) markers, in line with an integrated environmental health approach

The Role of the Pasteur Network

The Pasteur Network serves as a central convener and technical catalyst for this initiative, bringing together its members and external partners to design a coordinated and equitable wastewater surveillance architecture across Africa.

Building on the momentum of the June 2025 meeting at Institut Pasteur de Lille — which gathered more than 50 experts from five continents — the Pasteur Network is driving several key workstreams:

• Pan-African Survey: Leading an unprecedented continent-wide assessment of existing wastewater and environmental surveillance capacities, gaps, and funding landscapes, to inform the design of a contextually relevant network
• Regional Workshops: Facilitating structured dialogues to identify country- and region-specific needs, available resources, and priority pathogens for surveillance
• Capacity Strengthening: Supporting skills transfer and training across member institutions, with a particular focus on technical harmonization and methodological standards
• Policy and Financing Advocacy: Engaging national authorities and international donors to build the case for sustained, long-term investment in wastewater surveillance as a public health priority
• Knowledge Sharing: Enabling the exchange of best practices, tools, and data between network members to ensure that innovations developed in one context can be adapted and replicated across the continent