Highest financial push in four years to commercialise sanitation as a unique profit model in Africa, Asia and Latin America

At a time when innovative toilets in developed countries co-exist with night soil workers in developing countries, comes a handsome grant for an out-of-the-box provision for clean drinking water and the disposal of sewage.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made a generous grant of $5.6 million for the Sanitation as a Business programme of Water For People, a non-profit international development organisation.

The monetary support represents a considerable portion of the investment over four years in the voluntary organisation's new business initiative. It will test possible sustainable sanitation services in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This unusual scheme seeks to revolutionise a sector, otherwise ignored in the 11 countries the organisation operates from.

The initiative will combine profit incentives for small local companies and income-generation programmes for poor households and schools, demonstrating a shift from unsustainable, subsidy-based sanitation programmes toward sustainable, profitable sanitation services. By merging business principles of market research and segmentation with comprehensive community involvement and thorough evaluation of results, Water For People focuses on a scalable model, spreading affordable sanitation coverage in several locations world over.

“Water For People is honoured to receive this grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It will allow us to test, improve and expand our entrepreneurial Sanitation as a Business programme,” said its CEO, Ned Breslin. He added, “Ultimately, we seek to do more than bring sanitation to millions of people in developing countries. We seek to do so in a way that fundamentally transforms the sector. This model will challenge subsidy-driven, loan finance and passive private-sector approaches to the global sanitation crisis.”

Founded in 1991, Water For People focuses on long-lasting, safe drinking water resources and improved sanitation facilities in the developing world. While Water For People is in its 20th year of work, it focuses not on creating a dependency on charity in the 11 countries it works in, but rather strengthening the ability of the local community to plan, build, finance, maintain and operate their own systems.

“Identifying profitable business models that engage local communities is critical to create safe and sustainable sanitation systems,” according to Rachel Cardone, Programme Officer, Water, Sanitation & Hygiene, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She says, “Water For People is developing and testing these kinds of models, which have the potential to scale up across regions and improve the health, economic and social conditions of millions of poor people.”

Water For People, the organisation with an ironic name, first began experimenting with the Sanitation as a Business principle in Malawi, Africa in 2008. Since then, sanitation entrepreneurs have developed many maintenance relationships with households to service over 1,000 latrines.

Nick Burn, Water For People International Programme Director explains, “This programme is promising because in many respects it is not just about sanitation. Rather, it is about profit and services, using business as a vehicle for reaching far larger numbers of people with sanitation than traditional approaches have been able to do.”

Burn emphasises, “We hope to work in new ways to help increase impact, go to scale and ideally demonstrate to others that Sanitation as a Business is a powerful approach that can be replicated beyond our programmes.”

The organisation works in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America to show that its successful programmes are adaptable around the world and could be replicated anywhere.

For more information, please visit www.waterforpeople.org

Courtesy: Water For People