Today, November 19th, is the second annual World Toilet Day. This is a United Nations recognized day and the founding day of the World Toilet Organization in 2001. So what’s in it for you? How about: profits, protection of your personal health and increased personal safety.
The baseline facts
About 35% of the world, or 2.5 billion people, are estimated to not have access to toilets according to the World Toilet Organization 2013 Annual Report. According to the United Nations 14%, or 1 billion people, regularly defecate in the open air (no latrine, no privacy).
As Rose George, the journalist and author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World Of Human Waste And Why It Matters explains in the below TED Talk, “poop carries passengers.” The list of what Ms. George details we have the opportunity to find in one gram of human poop:
- 50 communicable diseases.
- 1 million bacteria.
- 10 million viruses.
- 1,000 parasite cysts.
- 100 worm eggs.
Among other things, diarrhea is something that happens due to lack of toilet access. According to the United States Center for Disease Control, about 2,200 children die every day from diarrhea, "more than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined." While money will be discussed further below, it should be noted the same referenced Center for Disease Control web page says, “$1 invested in diarrhea prevention yields an average return of $25.50” and “about 88% of diarrhea-associated deaths are attributable to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation, and insufficient hygiene.”
Where are those not using toilets living? Takepart published an infographic on this issue in April 2014 that describes the 16 countries where the most people lack proper sanitation, including but not limited to those who defecate in the open air:
- India, 818 million people or 65% of the population.
- China, 607 million people or 44% of the population.
- Indonesia, 109 million people or 43% of the population.
- Nigeria, 103 million people or 57% of the population.
- Pakistan, 98 million people or 52% of the population.
- Bangladesh, 75 million people or 48% of the population.
- Ethiopia, 71 million people or 80% of the population.
- Congo, 50 million people or 72% of the population.
- Brazil, 39 million people or 19% of the population.
- Tanzania, 32 million people or 68% of the population.
- Kenya, 27 million people or 64% of the population.
- Sudan, 27 million people or 73% of the population.
- Philippines, 22 million people or 22% of the population.
- Vietnam, 22 million people, or 24% of the population.
- Ghana, 20 million people or 74% of the population.
- Nepal, 20 million people or 71% of the population.
From cell phones to toilets, think about the toilet’s bottom line
Iqbal Quadir, founder of Legatum Center at MIT and Bangladesh’s largest cell phone provider Grameenphone, told me a story that convinced him that the poor needs good products and services, not necessarily free of costs. The Quadir family had a maid in its apartment in Dhaka, Bangladesh. One day, when he was going to his office, the housemaid asked him to mail a letter for her to go to her mother. Professor Quadir was surprised when the maid insisted that he does not put any stamp on the letter.
He was happily going to help out the maid by purchasing stamps for her and Professor Quadir was intrigued and inquired why the maid did not want him to purchase a stamp. He learned that without the stamp there is much greater assurance that the maid’s mother actually would receive the letter. When there is no stamp, the post office records the lack of postage and the recipient’s address from whom the postman is required to collect money that is double the regular postage.
When the lack of stamp gets recorded and twice-as-much money is collected, the poor have discovered a way to ensure getting a service. Otherwise, the postman may not take the trouble of walking some extra distance and actually delivering the letter. From this, Professor Quadir became very convinced that the poor are actually willing to pay more to obtain a reliable service that is of value to them. A poor person knows very well that a lack of service or an unreliable service is very costly to her.
What does this have to do with toilets? Everything.
Thorsten Kiefer, Founder and CEO of WASH United posted an article on Forbes earlier this week about why innovation is important in convincing people in India (and elsewhere) to actually use proper latrines and toilets. Like in Ms. George’s TED Talk above, the problem is raised that simply giving people latrines and toilets without educating them of their value is not enough. People go back to places where these items are donated after a few years and discover the donated repositories of human waste are now bike sheds, keeping goats or have been disassembled and used for other applications.
However, why I decided to write about this issue on Forbes is to flag investors and businessmen that there is a vast economic market that the right entrepreneurs can make a good deal of money on by providing proper sanitation with the right strategy to convince people of the services they get by having and using a toilet. Building out sanitation can involve small scale supplying of parts, labor, plumbing, cleaning products and so on. Genuine sanitation development involves significant infrastructure and investment. Private profitable enterprise can find ways to solve these problems, and market them properly to consumers, that governments have not.
Hypothetically, why would a venture capitalist give seed money to a sanitation development project?
- First mover status.
- With sanitation development, you create a market for hygiene goods.
- Proper hygiene reduces health problems which increases people’s ability to both get educated and work.
- As people are freed from hygiene related health problems that gives them greater opportunity to prosper, they eventually have more money for consumer goods.
- And then, the corporate entity with first mover status suddenly has a chunky market share of what is 1.5 billion people in India, China and Indonesia alone.
The phone company that was his idea still has 50% market share in Bangladesh one generation later
MIT’s Professor Quadir uses a simple insight that is actually very powerful in terms of provision of goods and services to the poor. Professor Quadir’s point is that if you provide a productivity tool to a poor person and create the right arrangement, you do not necessarily need to worry about the purchasing power of that person. The tool allows the person to leverage his own energy and initiatives, and then earn more and pay for the goods and services. The key is to enable the poor to leverage his own energy and initiatives.
For instance, a person pays a few pennies to make a phone call but saves a day of travel, the time she could earn, say, $2. The pennies are a minor cost relative to her gain. The phone is a productivity tool. By that same thinking, Professor Quadir goes on, a bottle of potable water is such a tool because it prevents days of sickness in which the person cannot earn income. A bottle of ketchup is a productivity tool, because it saves hours of cooking allowing the person to earn money during that time. Professor Quadir's concept of productivity tool is rather broad.
Profitability
Telenor, a communication business based in Norway, today is part owner of the mobile phone company Professor Quadir had the idea for (Grameenphone in Bangladesh). The company did well enough with its venture in Bangladesh that it has continued to expand in developing economies. Last year, they were one of two companies that won licenses to expand Myanmar's telecommunications. Telenor did not beat out bids from France Telecom, George Soros and Singapore Telecommunications because there's no money to be made servicing the people of Myanmar, but because they see a market opportunity. Along with Bangladesh and Myanmar, Telenor today operates business in India, Pakistan, Thailand and Malaysia, as it expands in Asia.
We have become adept at understanding how providing people technological access such as mobile phones, computers and Internet access can enhance productivity and opportunity for people but only a generation ago these ideas did not seem possible to achieve in the early 1990s. What not enough people are thinking about yet is that more basic technologies such as toilets and modernizing sanitation can also both increase productivity and become profitable business lines.
For projects such as these, we use terms like impact investing and social enterprise now. The thesis behind these terms though is that when a situation is approached properly and thoughtfully, for-profit solutions work. The only things that prevent traditional businesses from approaching projects taken on by advocates of impact investing and social enterprise are that they have not traditionally been viewed as profitable and scalable enough.
Yet ideas are seeping into the mainstream from impact investing and social enterprise. Peter Frykman and Driptech, of which he is CEO, were featured in the World Economic Forum's 2012 Technology Pioneers Report not just because it helped poor agriculture workers with his drip irrigation technology, but because it is profitable. There are ideas and marketing strategies that can work to turn the problems of poorer people into for-profit solutions.
In the TED Talk below, Arunachalam Muruganantham talks about how he came up with a solution to one aspect of the global sanitation problem that particularly impacts women. He did this by the most basic instinct of inventors, he saw a problem that needed solving and he kept working at it until he solved it.
The global sanitation problem is a marketplace of 2.5 billion people, twice as many people as live in the Chinese market so many businesses have enthusiastically entered for the last two decades.
Global Health, The Gender Gap, Global Safety
Other knock-on effects of helping solve the global sanitation problem include improving the three things in the bold header above. The healthcare improvement is the obvious benefit for those without proper sanitation. Less obvious is that the transmittable diseases people acquire because they don’t have proper sanitation do go global (just as Ebola recently rather publically traveled long distances).
An October 2014 Guardian article details inadequate toilet access is not merely a problem at home but also at school. In less developed countries, some schools don’t have toilets or if they do the numbers are sometimes on the order of the 1 for 600 students mentioned in the article. For young women who have just begun menstruating, this becomes a greater problem that causes them to miss school days and sometimes cease going to school. Beyond school, there are the additional issues of safety for women that must use open air facilities.
In terms of global safety, there are a few points if you are willing to accept some of the below little logical syllogisms (though you need not accept all of them, or that all of them are good):
- When people’s children have more reliable health, they have less children.
- When people have less children, they have greater economic opportunity.
- When people have greater health, they have greater economic opportunity.
- When people have greater economic opportunity, they are less likely to be in poverty.
- When young girls stay in school longer, they are less likely to marry in their teenage years and less likely to have impoverished children.
- When young girls stay in school longer, they have a greater voice in their household finance.
- When there are less people with communicable diseases, people everywhere – including in the developed world – have better health.
- When there are less people who live without good health and in poverty, there is less political tension in the world.
- (add your own, think of something small with big numbers, 2.5 billion people big)
Conclusion
Listen to what Arunachalam Muruganantham did in the above TED Talk and read about him more. Mr. Muruganantham put his mind to solving the problem of the cost of the sanitary pad for women (beginning with the cost for his wife and their neighbors in India) and is now helping women around his region to launch small businesses that help them make money and afford sanitary pads. While influential agencies from the Copenhagen Consensus Center to the Gates Foundation issue reports on water and sanitation issues and initiatives, Mr. Muuganantham took on the issue his own home faced without grant money or scientific degree and solved it. The global sanitation problem needs the right blend of corporate investment, entrepreneurial spirit and marketing savvy. Maybe one person reading this is the right person to get the job moving more rapidly in the right direction.
