Changelog

Collection in Lusaka is franchised zone by zone, and the register is public but was only readable through a map widget. Find your area, or type a place near you, and the page says which zone it falls in, which company holds the franchise, and — for the six of 39 zones that publish one — which day the round comes. For 15 of the zones the register names no collector at all, and the page says so plainly, because that is the likeliest answer to why nobody comes. Nobody publishes what collection costs, so the page does not pretend to know.

The waste register was read properly this time, including the endpoints nobody had looked at, and the city's structural waste figures are now sourced to the council's and the ministry's own documents rather than carried as prose. Also records what is still not published anywhere: what collection costs.

Most of Zambia's electricity is made from water behind Kariba Dam, and the Zambezi River Authority publishes the lake's level every week. The page reads it directly — 480.97 m, 39.09% of usable storage on 28 September, against 15.29% on the same date last year — alongside the range the turbines can run in and the 36 billion cubic metres the two countries are allowed to pass this year. It is the figure underneath every statement about load shedding, and it never says the lights will stay on.

Two things were added to Lusaka's page today, and one existing page was corrected. **What Your Electricity Money Buys.** The residential tariff is stepped — the first 100 units of the month cost K0.35 each before tax and the next 100 cost K1.00 — so the same K100 buys very different amounts depending on what the meter has already used. This works it out for you, shows what the units will actually run, and lets you check a purchase you have already made against the published rate. The figures come from the Energy Regulation Board's own decision of 31 October 2025, with the 3% excise duty and 16% VAT added, because that is what you hand over. There is one thing we could not find out and the page says so: whether a prepaid meter counts those steps across the whole calendar month. Nobody publishes it. If you buy twice in a month and notice the second token gives fewer units, we would like to know. **Has the Water Come?** LWSC has rationed supply since May 2024 and nothing published says whether today's turn actually happened in your area. This is a board of what neighbours say: pick your area, say when the water last ran there, and see what other people nearby have said. Reading it needs no account; posting needs you to be signed in, so one person is one voice. It reaches your neighbours, not LWSC — the utility's own numbers are at the foot of the page, and a failed supply is worth reporting to both. **A correction.** Our rainy-season and cholera page said an outbreak was still running, with a case figure we can no longer trace to any source. The Ministry of Health declared that outbreak over on 16 July 2026. The page now carries the Ministry's own figures, says where the outbreak actually started and where most of it happened, and has been rewritten to be useful before the rains rather than alarming about something that has ended. We are sorry it stood as long as it did.

Zambia's capital joins the platform with three tools grounded in what changed and what's still true: the current status of ZESCO's nationwide load shedding (suspended since June 2026, tied to Kariba's water level — not the 2024 answer search engines still return), a neighbour-reported board of what market staples actually cost this week, and a plain explanation of why the rainy season brings flood and cholera risk here, with what to do about it.