Rising Tides, Rising Solutions: Tackling Wastewater in Fiji
3 March 2026
Above: The Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) is streaming the video on their website.
The Wastewater Challenge is a compelling look at RISE’s work in Fiji, capturing the scale of the challenge, innovation and the promise of community engagement, all packaged into a powerful nine-minute video.
Set in Suva, where rapid urban growth is putting pressure on already stretched infrastructure, this TV segment, which aired on ABC Pacific, shows the realities facing residents in informal settlements. Poor infrastructure, such as makeshift toilets connected to overflow-prone drums, leads to contamination and flooding, particularly during high tides, posing serious environmental and health risks.
Small World Stories, who produced the episode, followed our RISE Fiji team working alongside communities to co-design and deliver practical wastewater systems that respond to local conditions. The segment explains the technology, showing how decentralised systems capture waste onsite to reduce contamination risks.
RISE Deputy Director of Intervention, Kerrie Burge, features in The Wastewater Challenge, the sixth episode in a series called Common Cause.
Importantly, the video doesn’t overlook the complexity behind the work. Viewers see the realities of troubleshooting infrastructure, adapting systems to challenging environments, and navigating policy gaps and processes. The piece reinforces that this kind of innovation requires persistence, collaboration and flexibility.
Community members are active participants in the process. Through training and engagement, they gain the skills to manage and maintain the systems, building confidence, ownership, and pride in their surroundings. That sense of retained dignity and community resilience reflects our mission.
More broadly, this video positions our work within a regional context. It shows how Australian expertise in water-sensitive design is being adapted in meaningful ways, while also demonstrating that solutions must be locally grounded to succeed.
The RISE approach is not presented as an easy fix. The Wastewater Challenge shows that despite the challenges, our progress and learnings are real. Viewers see that sustainable, community-based sanitation solutions are achievable and scalable, offering a model that could be replicated across other Pacific communities facing similar challenges.
