Living Near a Dumpsite Raises Malaria Risk in Ghana’s Urbanising Communities

In the rapidly urbanising towns of Ghana’s Bono Region, the distance between a family’s home and the nearest refuse dump may be quietly shaping their risk of one of Africa’s deadliest diseases. A new spatial study from the Dormaa Central Municipality has found that malaria occurrence declines consistently as residential distance from solid waste dumpsites increases, offering some of the clearest local evidence yet that poor waste management is helping to fuel urban malaria transmission. The research, published in SN Social Sciences, combined household survey data, malaria incidence records and a geographic information system (GIS) framework to map exactly where the disease clusters and why.

The research team, led by Nana Agyemang Prempeh of the University of Energy and Natural Resources in Sunyani, focused on six communities within the municipality: Dormaa, Ahantrease, Kokorasua, ABB, Kofi Asua and Maasu. These settlements span a gradient of urbanisation, from the denser municipal core to peri-urban fringes where formal waste collection remains patchy. Across much of sub-Saharan Africa, urbanisation was once expected to suppress malaria, because paved surfaces and piped water reduce the standing water that Anopheles mosquitoes need to breed. Instead, unplanned growth has produced a patchwork of unserviced neighbourhoods where open dumps, blocked drains and discarded containers create ideal larval habitats in the middle of densely populated areas.

To capture this environmental signature, the researchers deployed an integrated analytical pipeline. Buffer analysis drew concentric zones around each mapped dumpsite, allowing malaria cases to be tallied by distance band from the waste source. Spatial autocorrelation statistics then tested whether cases were scattered randomly across the landscape or grouped into statistically significant hotspots. Finally, regression modelling quantified the strength and direction of the association between dumpsite proximity and malaria occurrence, controlling for the spatial structure of the data. This combination matters because a simple correlation between distance and disease could be an artefact of clustering; only by testing the spatial pattern itself can researchers distinguish a genuine environmental gradient from random noise.

The spatial statistics revealed striking heterogeneity between communities. In Dormaa and Ahantrease, malaria cases displayed significant spatial clustering, meaning that households with malaria were not distributed at random but concentrated in identifiable hotspots on the map. Kokorasua showed a dispersed pattern, with cases spread more evenly across the settlement, while Kofi Asua exhibited near-random spatial organisation, suggesting that locally operating environmental drivers there were weaker or more uniformly distributed. These differences underscore a central lesson of modern spatial epidemiology: malaria in urbanising Africa is not a single phenomenon but a mosaic of local transmission regimes, each shaped by its own configuration of waste, water and housing.

Despite this heterogeneity in clustering, one relationship held with remarkable uniformity. In every community studied, malaria occurrence declined as residential distance from dumpsites increased, and the regression results confirmed a consistent inverse association between dumpsite proximity and malaria occurrence. In practical terms, the closer a household lives to an open dump, the more likely its members are to appear in malaria records. The biological pathway is plausible: unmanaged waste piles collect rainwater in discarded containers, tyres and plastic sheeting, while organic refuse enriches the water with nutrients that accelerate larval development. Dumps also shelter adult mosquitoes during hot, dry periods, extending transmission seasons. The result is a peridomestic breeding ecology that places dumpside residents at persistent, elevated exposure.

The demographic layer of the analysis added a second, equally urgent dimension. Children under ten years of age recorded the highest malaria prevalence of any age group across the municipality, a finding consistent with a broader literature showing that young children, whose acquired immunity is still developing, bear the heaviest burden of malaria in endemic settings. Pregnant women also exhibited elevated prevalence in several communities, reflecting both the immunological changes of pregnancy that increase susceptibility to infection and the dangers malaria poses to maternal and fetal health. When these vulnerable groups live closest to dumpsites, the environmental and demographic gradients compound each other, concentrating risk in precisely the households least equipped to absorb it.

These findings arrive amid a growing body of evidence that waste management and infectious disease are deeply entangled. Recent studies from Ghana have documented substantial waste management challenges and disease burdens among marginalised populations, and systematic reviews from Ethiopia and elsewhere have linked improper municipal solid waste management to broader One Health concerns spanning human, animal and environmental health. Globally, research on landfilling and open dumping has catalogued pollution pathways ranging from leachate contamination to air quality degradation. The Dormaa study adds a spatially explicit malaria dimension to this picture, demonstrating that the health costs of unserviced waste are not diffuse but measurable, mappable and, crucially, addressable at the neighbourhood scale.

The authors argue that their results point toward complementary rather than competing interventions. Strengthening waste management systems, through regular collection, engineered disposal sites and community-level sanitation enforcement, would attack the environmental root of the exposure gradient. Spatial planning tools, including the buffer and hotspot maps produced by this kind of analysis, could guide where waste infrastructure is placed and where vector control resources are concentrated. Meanwhile, targeted malaria interventions, such as prioritising insecticide-treated nets and case management for households within high-risk zones near dumpsites, and for children under ten and pregnant women specifically, would protect the most vulnerable while the slower work of environmental reform proceeds. The study’s integration of household surveys with routine incidence records offers a template that other urbanising municipalities in Ghana and across the Global South could adapt at relatively low cost.

The research also carries a caution for how malaria elimination strategies are designed. National programmes have traditionally concentrated on rural, high-transmission settings, on the assumption that cities are relatively protected. But as this study and others on urban malaria across Africa show, peri-urban zones undergoing rapid, unplanned growth can sustain meaningful transmission, often in micro-foci tied to specific environmental features like dumps and drains. Missing these foci allows reservoirs of infection to persist at the urban edge, undermining regional elimination goals. Spatially explicit surveillance of the kind demonstrated in Dormaa Central provides the resolution needed to find and treat such foci before they seed wider outbreaks.

For the residents of Dormaa, Ahantrease, Kokorasua, ABB, Kofi Asua and Maasu, the message is tangible: the pile of refuse at the end of the street is not merely an aesthetic nuisance but a measurable determinant of who falls ill with malaria. For policymakers, the study transforms an intuitive suspicion, that dumps and disease go together, into a quantified spatial relationship, complete with the analytical tools to replicate it elsewhere. As Ghana’s municipalities continue to grow faster than their waste infrastructure, the convergence of GIS-based epidemiology, demographic vulnerability mapping and sanitation investment may prove one of the most cost-effective frontiers in the country’s long fight against malaria.

Subject of Research: Spatial association between solid waste dumpsite proximity and malaria occurrence in an urbanising Ghanaian municipality

Article Title: Spatial analysis of dumpsite proximity and malaria occurrence in Dormaa central municipality, Ghana

Article References: Prempeh, N. A., Damoah-Afari, P., Okrah, A., Mensah, C., Danquah, L., Wireko-Gyebi, R., Kumi, N., Otu-Larbi, F., Kyere-Boateng, R., Nooni, I. K., Nyamekye, K. A., Anima, P., Bediako-Kyeremeh, B., & Yeboah, E. (2026). Spatial analysis of dumpsite proximity and malaria occurrence in Dormaa central municipality, Ghana. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 364. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01646-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01646-8

Keywords: malaria, Ghana, dumpsite proximity, GIS, spatial analysis, solid waste management, Dormaa Central Municipality, spatial autocorrelation, buffer analysis, urbanisation, public health, vector-borne disease