Revitalising Informal Settlements and Their Environments (RISE) Program

The Revitalising Informal Settlements and their Environments (RISE) program is researching how innovative water sensitive infrastructure can improve health, wellbeing, and water management across urban informal settlements in Indonesia and Fiji. 2021 RISE embraced the new operating environment that COVID-19 has created, and used it to show that breaking down structural inequalities of international collaboration can lead to new innovations and efficiencies, and that research and development programs can be stronger because of it.

The program's accelerated transition to a more strongly locally led model is giving greater agency to RISE research and implementation partners and creating new opportunities, such as establishing state-of-the-art PCR-based pathogen detection capacity at the RISE laboratories hosted at Hasanuddin University and Fiji National University, and instituting an ISO9001 quality management system across the RISE international research platform.