Reducing disease from unsafe drinking-water is a key environmental health objective in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, where water management is largely community-based. The effectiveness of environmental health risk reporting to motivate sustained behaviour change is contested but as efforts to increase rural drinking-water monitoring proceed, it is timely to ask how water quality information feedback can improve water safety management. Using cross-sectional (1457 households) and longitudinal (167 participants) surveys, semi-structured interviews (73 participants), and water quality monitoring (79 sites), we assess water safety perceptions and evaluate an information intervention through which Escherichia coli monitoring results were shared with water managers over a 1.5-year period in rural Kitui County, Kenya. We integrate the extended parallel process model and the precaution adoption process model to frame risk information processing and stages of behaviour change. We highlight that responses to risk communications are determined by the specificity, framing, and repetition of messaging and the self-efficacy of information recipients. Poverty threatscapes and gender norms hinder behaviour change, particularly at the household-level; however, test results can motivate supply-level managers to implement hazard control measures—with effectiveness and sustainability dependent on infrastructure, training, and ongoing resourcing. Our results have implications for rural development efforts and environmental risk reporting in low-income settings.

Access to water and sanitation as a basic human right is still limited within resource-poor rural settings of Africa, including Kitui, Kenya. This is exacerbated by prevailing gender inequalities which can be mediated when communities leverage on social capital. Qualitative methods were used to examine how values embedded in social capital enable women and vulnerable groups to cope with household water insecurity. How communities exploit the bonding and bridging dimensions of social capital to cope with water insecurities has gendered implications. Understanding the role of social capital is important in advancing public policy to reduce gender inequalities in water access.

Understanding the nature and scope of existing social capital is essential to building the resilience of people living in vulnerable urban settings. This paper explores the question of how aid organisations can better utilise social capital to build the resilience of communities in slums. It specifically examines the relationship between social capital and urban vulnerability. The study used a mixed-methods approach to understand the diverse perspectives of social capital and uncover relationships that exist between social capital, absorptive and adaptive coping strategies in Kibera and Kawangware slums in Nairobi, Kenya. The findings show that coping is not a community or a societal issue; people living in slums resort to either absorptive or adaptive coping strategies or a combination of both due to the precariousness of livelihoods in such contexts. Measures of bonding, bridging, and linking social capital in slums are significantly associated with adaptive coping strategies. Families that had more dependents, were taking care of ill members or that had no regular source of income were more likely to resort to withdrawing children from school, begging, selling assets, amongst others. Livelihood studies overlook critical aspects of social capital such as bridges and linkages, which are essential for building the transformative capacities of slum dwellers. Therefore, aid actors should focus on social capital if they are to build the capacities of people living in slums. More attention should be given to the role of local organisations and initiatives in establishing bridges and linkages so as not to undermine communities’ existing capacities and resource base.

Background: Zoonotic diseases pose a direct threat to health and undercut livelihoods in the communities in which they occur. A combination of anthropogenic, animal and ecosystem activities drives the emergence and re-emergence of zoonotic diseases. Consequently, One health approaches are necessary to alleviate disease impacts. Livestock traders interact closely with livestock, which puts them at high risk of infection and creates conditions by which they may spread zoonotic. It is thus essential to examine practices among actors involved in the livestock trade to understand how well to mitigate these risks. Methods: A qualitative study was conducted among the actors in the livestock trade in Busia County on their knowledge, attitudes and practices that may contribute to the spread, control and prevention of zoonotic disease transmission. A thematic analysis framework was used to categorize and synthesize data from in-depth interviews (IDIs) and the key informant interviews ( KIIs). Results: Whereas participants could list livestock diseases, they could not identify them as zoonotic demonstrating insufficient knowledge of zoonosis. They identify sick animals by checking for dropped ears, mass mucus production; diarrhea; bloody urinal discharge; and general animal activity levels. To prevent the spread of these diseases, they wash their animals, isolate sick animals from the rest of the stock; vaccinate their animals. They seek help from animal health professionals for the sick animals as curative practices. The practices of skinning dead animals before burying them and the consumption of dead carcasses increase the risk of zoonotic disease transmission. Conclusions: Livestock actors are critical in the prevention and elimination of zoonotic diseases, hence they need to be involved when developing intervention programs and policies for the animal health extension services. Training them as a continuum of animal health workers blends lay and professional knowledge, which alongside their intense contact with large numbers of animals becomes a critical disease surveillance tool. Increasing awareness on zoonoses by using multi-disciplinary teams with social scientists so that the risky but deeply rooted traditional practices can be minimized is needed urgently.

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