School Sanitation & Hygiene Program

In order to change the attitude towards hygiene in society the best place to start is within schools. Children need to live the experience of using toilets rather than explaining it to them. The health consequences of using a toilet are fundamental to allow them a consistent school education. Also it is them that will educate their parents and thus society. Empower them to teach. I have met Jack Sim, the CEO and founder of the WTO in Berlin recently and share his vision of allowing 2,6 billion people to have access to sanitation by empowering them to know ho to do it themselves and wanting it.

I first read about the WTO when its founder received the prestigious Social Enterpreneur award of the Schwab Foundation in 2005. I think we all can relate to the serious humiliation that shitting in public involves. I myself have seen long lines - sometimes involving waits of over an hour - in front of the few existing public toilets in Indian cities. The mixing of cooking water, washing water and shit-bearing water creates a fertile ground for many life-threatening disease conditions. At the same time the lack of toilets in schools has been identified as one of the main reasons girls abstain from school. WTO is at the avantgarde of what famous anthropologist and World Bank advisor Arjun Appadurai calls "the politics of shit" and I hope that many betterplacers will support its work.