Toilets for 2.6 Billion People

Location:	Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Category:	Health
Published:	10 April 2008
Progress:	0% funded

Rating:	20 Ratings

Market-based approach for achieving social goals:
WTO aims to drive a market-based strategy to deliver sanitation and to accelerate the progress towards meeting the sanitation Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015. If current trends continue, there will be 2.4 billion people without basic sanitation in 2015.

WTO visualizes the 2.6 billion toilet-less as potential customers. Formally ignored and neglected as potential consumers, the people at the so-called “bottom of the pyramid” have recently become the focus of parts of both the corporate and development community. Partly thanks to an ideological shift in thinking about markets, as well as due to new technological developments, this group is suddenly seen as a new and promising market, in which the sheer number of potential consumers compensates for their little individual purchasing power

Why Sanitation is Off track to meet the MDG?
Today’s market for sanitation is dysfunctional, due to muted demand, low priority among individuals, low capacities in appropriate technologies and lack of (freely) available sanitation designs for mass production thus preventing an efficient market for sanitation from emerging. Dependence on donations is not sufficient to solve the problem of such a vast magnitude. Market based approach is required to address the problem at a large scale

Plan:
WTO is committed to building the efficient market infrastructure. WTO wants to drive demand through awareness, mindset change, low pricing and stylizing toilets so as to make it a symbol of status and owners pride. On the other hand WTO wants to install efficient market infrastructure. The objective is to create Integrated Supply Chain:

In phase 1, WTO aims to reach out to 3 million people, approximating to about 500,000 families in India and China.

Supporters (4):

• 
  O. Klein
• 
  J. Baumhau–
  er
• 
  H. S.
• 
  W. Aisslin–
  ger

Advocates (3):

• 

  H. Knott

  F • Berlin, Germany

  Whoever travelled in urban India arriving at a bus or train station does not forget the painful search for a decent toilet. If one imagines, that around the world, 2.6 billion people do not have a clean and safe place to use for performing their bodily functions - they lack that necessity, a toilet. This global scandal constitutes an affront to human dignity on a massive scale, and South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are the most and worst affected areas in the world. The non-existence of toilets has serious consequences for human health, the environment and economic development. It is known that unsafe water and lack of sanitation causes 80% of all sickness and disease and kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Having worked as the project coordinator of a drinking water programme financed by the German Bank for Reconstruction (KfW) in Sub-Saharan Africa I came across the inadequate handling of wastewater, which contaminates the water supply, increasing the risk of infectious diseases and deteriorating groundwater and other local ecosystems. The lack of clean water, coupled with the lack of basic sanitation is one of the largest obstacles to progress and sound changes in daily life in those regions. Almost one billion children live without even basic sanitation. Every 20 seconds, a child dies because of poor sanitation. That is 1.5.million preventable deaths each year. Improved sanitation helps to reduce cholera, worms, diarrhea, pneumonia and other waterborne diseases. Join the WTO in their strife for that change in South Asia, not only to the effect that the UN declared 2008 as the Year of Sanitation.

• 

  Joana B.

  43/F • Berlin, Germany

  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. Since WTO first posted a project on betterplace, we have started on a larger cooperation for their market-based approach to solve the global sanitation problem. German designer Werner Aisslinger decided to dedicate his time, together with his students at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlruhe, to design toilets which can be the pride of their owners. On May 20th 2008, WTO founder Jack Sim will be coming to Berlin to organise a workshop with the students. In the evening we will be hosting a dinner cum workshop together with a small group of people working in the sanitation industry, for foundations and financial institutions, in the development sector as well as designers and business consultants. From our perspective at betterplace, the WTO is a highly motivated and competent NGO, who deserves all the support it can get.

• 

  Josefina P.

  F • Berlin, Germany

  Auch wenn der Titel der Organisation einem merkwürdig vorkommt, die WTO ist ein erfahrenes Organ auf dem Gebiet des boP Segment und sehr engagiert. Die Zusammenarbeit von betterplace mit der WTO und dem Leiter Jack Sim ist sehr professionell und zuverlässig. Wir freuen uns sehr, dieses sehr gut dargestellte und dokumentierte Projekt auf betterplace zu haben und freuen uns über großen Zuspruch.

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