Jack Sim, Ashoka fellow and founder of the Singapore-based World Toilet Organization, says a market-based approach is the key to providing sanitation to under-served communities in the developing world.
 | Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization and Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur“We went to the villages and saw that the people have cell phones and televisions, but no toilets.” (Photo: WTO) |
One of the Millennium Development Goals is to increase access to water and sanitation by 2015. How is the international community doing?
Basically, the world is failing in the sanitation sector. Water seems to be progressing, but because water and sanitation are funded together, and water is more visible or glamorous, the funding goes to water. Sanitation has been in the shadow of this coupling of water and sanitation. It's very good that it's the Year for International Sanitation, but we need to create a molecular, structural change in the mindset of people in the way we address this issue this year, because next year will be the international year of something else, and the agenda might be lost.
What is the best way to increase access to sanitation?
What is needed is to create a market-based approach to sanitation, whereby you create a market of supply and demand. And it must be efficient. Right now, if you look at sanitation, it is a dysfunctional market: it does not have a demand, does not have supply, and does not have efficient price mechanism, or profit motive. It relies on donations that are few and far between, and the projects come only one at a time.
You need to acquire knowledge of the different products that are socially acceptable in different situations, priced affordably, and produced in large volumes, so that it can be replicated. Distribution should be done through local entrepreneurs, which is the cheapest form of distribution. There are a lot of social entrepreneurs around that can immediately tap into this market. Anyone who is distributing health, poverty alleviation, rural development, women's rights, and education can also be a distributor of sanitation.
 | Sanitation Graphic (click image to enlarge)See how different countries compare in providing access to adequate sanitation |
And what about the demand side?
A lot of people who defecate in the open don't yet see the need to have a toilet, because they have been doing it for generations. If someone explained to them in a very rational manner that toilets benefit health, maybe they could see the need. But if you just give these people a toilet, they convert it into a storeroom, kitchen, or another room in the house.
So how do you convert that into a demand? Typically, we see that people are motivated by ego; by fear of not being accepted by society. If we create toilets and sanitation as status symbols, then we can drive demand and encourage a change of habits. How do we do this? We create products that are very sexy: colorful and things that easily identify with their status in life, and yet isare not expensive and can be financed through microfinance institutions. There is also infrastructure that is needed. We need to train the locals to become distributors, and train them to install and maintain these toilets.
How do you make a toilet "sexy"?
Right now, there is a wide range of toilets. Some are canvas wrapped around four sticks stuck in the ground, or the better ones with hollow cement blocks and a tin roof and wooden door. But this doesn't look that great, does it? If we could produce it, let's say with steel or plastic injection molding, deliver them to remote places, and produce them like IKEA - in very big volumes - this can be the solution. Really, we are trying to be the IKEA for the poor in the sanitation systems.
If we produce them in colors, we could imagine villagers talking to each other, "oh, what color do you have? Mine is red." We want to sell it the same way people in the cities are buying designer bags, because these are all emotional purchases. Nobody needs a designer handbag, but you buy it because you want to have some kind of social ranking.
Your organization has done some work in tsunami-stricken Banda Aceh. What is the sanitation situation there, years after the 2004 disaster?
Our project there has been completed. We built public toilets in very busy places - near marketplaces and mosques. Because of the very big volume of traffic there, we are using the biogas model, so that all of this waste can be converted into methane for cooking. The person who maintains that is actually paid in gas.
The World Toilet Organization finds technologies that are already proven; we do not reinvent the wheel. We bring in experts to train the locals, and we have started training courses, and the local engineers are now adapting and using their knowledge. Even after the project is over, they will continue to build these, because it becomes a business for them. Only when sanitation becomes a business is it very sustainable, because history has shown us that the market economy is the only way to guarantee the service.
What are some of the other projects your organization is working on?
We just went to the Philippines, where we have worked with a local microfinance institution, and we went to the slums in Manila, and we saw that a lot of the people want to improve their toilets, and they are willing to pay for it with a microloan. It is something that just requires good marketing, and distribution and supply channels to reach them.
We also went to villages and saw that the people have cell phones and televisions, but no toilets. Of course, if we are judgmental, we can say that they've got their priorities wrong. But we don't want to be judgmental; we want to understand what motivates them to buy a phone first, and not a toilet.
editor: Valdis Wish
publishing date: March 18, 2008
