Zambia’s capital city of Lusaka has the infrastructure to accommodate just a fraction of its current population. As part of his work with Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), an independent U.S. foreign aid agency, Patrick Francis is playing a key role in upgrading the city’s water supply, sanitation, and drainage with the goal of decreasing the incidence of water-related diseases, generating time savings for households and businesses, and mitigating business and residential flood losses for 1.5 million citizens.

“There is a big stress on the existing infrastructure,” he said. “But we’re not just upgrading the drainage systems. We are also looking at the environmental and social aspects of our proposed improvements.” An issue arose when Francis and other planners realized that the new drainage system would spill out on the outskirts of the city, where a small unplanned settlement could then face life-threatening flooding.

“It had not occurred to enough people at the right time that this was a potential negative consequence of what we were doing,” Francis said. “We kept voicing that this is a serious problem, and we need to address it. Ultimately, we moved about $20 million around to rescope the project and carefully move the water through the settlement. We likely saved some lives as a result.”

Quality engagement with stakeholders is a high priority for Francis, and for MCC. “Any time you are dealing with large scale infrastructure, you will very often have some of the poorest people in the country on the front lines. Talk to them. Go house to house,” he said. “In Zambia, we knew where that drain was going to run, and we spent a lot of time in that local community. Some of these people suffered an initial negative impact when we had to acquire pieces of their land. We talked to them personally and directly to find out exactly what they felt was the value of what they were losing, to learn how to compensate them so they would be better off than when we arrived.”

A small-town Michigan native, Francis credits the Peace Corps with opening up the doors to the world for him. He spent 22 years overseas working for environmental NGOs and bilateral and international organizations.  Among his most satisfying achievements he was instrumental in setting up a watchdog network for all of central and eastern Europe that keeps an eye on the environmental and social impacts of international financial institutions.  He also helped establish new environmental funding institutions in several countries around the world.