The American non-governmental organization Water.org estimates 11 percent of the population lacks access to safe water, and that women and children spend 200 million hours per day collecting water.
Jan-Willem Rosenboom is a Senior Program Officer for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He says the organization realized they were effective at community level-work, but didn’t have good ways to deliver services on a large scale.
He also argues throwing money at the problem won’t solve the world’s water and sanitation problem.
“We should never think of charitable spending and aid as the solution,” Rosenboom says. “That would be a non-starter, just in terms of the amounts of money you would talk about, not just to provide access to services, but to sustain services.”
That’s where the private sector comes in.
“The same way you have your water service from a utility that provides services, you pay your monthly bill, and they take care of providing you with clean drinking water,” Rosenboom says. “And one of the things we work on is literally trying to develop the business models that would help countries do that.”
Watch a panel discussion featuring Jan-Willem Rosenboom at the 2014 University of Oklahoma Water Symposium
In the short-term, the Gates Foundation is using a “demand-led” market approach by investing in a call center to help empty septic tanks in Dakar, Senegal.
“People call [a central telephone number], they say, ‘I want to have my septic tank emptied. I want to have my pit emptied.’,” Rosenboom says. “And the call center bids out that job to trucks in the area, and the truck operators can bid on that particular demand, and the lowest bigger gets the job.
And the market forces have worked. Rosenboom says demand has gone up, so more households call for the services. That means the price has gone down, because the number of jobs individual operators do has gone up.
“The amount of fecal sludge that is taken to the treatment plant has gone up as well, to the point where the city-level operator of the treatment plant is a profit-making entity,” Rosenboom says. “Dakar comes out as a city that's doing well in terms of its regulatory environment, in terms of its policies and the services available, yet city-wide only 37 percent of all the fecal sludge that they produce is treated. So it's doing well, but it can do better.”
Long-term, the foundation is trying to develop technology that will help decentralized waste treatment, and even redefine the entire idea of “waste.”
“We have a unit being tested in Seattle right now that produces 600 kilowatts of electricity and 1,000 gallons of drinking water per hour out of fecal sludge that is fed into the system from 100,000 people, about 20,000 households,” Rosenboom says. “Imagine that you change that to a point where you can actually make money out of doing that. And that should make it much more interesting for both governments and private operators to do that.”
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
SUZETTE GRILLOT, HOST: Jan-Willem Rosenboom, welcome to World Views.
JAN-WILLEM ROSENBOOM: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
GRILLOT: So Jan-Willem, you work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which I think must be a fascinating place to work. They have such incredible things they're trying to achieve. But the work that you're doing there as a Senior Program Officer is in the area of sanitation. You're working on demand-led sanitation, urban sanitation markets. Can you tell us about your work in particular, this demand-led sanitation activities that you're working on.
ROSENBOOM: Sure. The demand-led sanitation portfolio came out of one of the problems we wanted to solve in sanitation. And that was widespread access in rural areas to sanitation services and the realization that while we had interesting and effective ways to work at the community level in a demand-led way on creating demand for sanitation, we didn't have really good ways to deliver services at scale. And to really say, 'If you want to make a difference in the number of people in the world that are without services, then you need to start finding ways of doing that work beyond one community, two communities, or one district. But begin to think about how would something like this work at the country level? How would it work at the state level in India? Or at the state level in Nigeria? So that was a large part of my early work, my early portfolio with the Foundation. Only recently supplemented by work in urban sanitation markets, which really focus on urban sanitation and particularly linking to our efforts to come up with sanitation services that don't need connection to a sewer. That don't need a connection to a water supply, yet gives us service-level, the toilet we're all used to, and figuring out how we can establish markets for these new technologies and new service models and business models.
GRILLOT: I think one of the things that interests me, in just the title of your position, I mean when we think of sanitation and promoting and sanitation and access to sewers, water, clean water, whatever - we're thinking of assistance, and aid, the engineering, and all of the things that we need to provide to communities to do that. But even in the title of your position, we're talking about "demand-led" issues, and markets for these issues. It's like there's a little different spin on it, in that respect. You just referred to creating markets for these things, creating products that serve a certain market. So should we start thinking about sanitation more as a business prospect? As something that's a social entrepreneurial activity that's going on, as opposed to aid assistance, the human rights, the human welfare part of it, that it's about business?
ROSENBOOM: Sure, sure. So there's really two sides to that. I guess one thing to begin with is to say aid is never going to solve the sanitation problem globally. And that's not necessary either. There will always be room for aid. There will always be room for public spending by governments, public subsidies to households. But we should never think of charitable spending and aid as the solution to the sanitation crisis. That would be a non-starter, just in terms of the amounts of money you would talk about, not just to provide access to services, but to sustain services, right? So where the private sector comes in for us is to say, "We would love to see sanitation service provision develop, almost like a utility. The same way you have your water service from a utility that provides services, you pay your monthly bill, and they take care of providing you with clean drinking water. And one of the things we work on is literally trying to develop the business models that would help countries do that. That would get business people or entrepreneurs interested in entering the sanitation field, which is actually a task all in itself. I don't think there are very many people that tell their mother-in-law, "It's my ambition in life to empty septic tanks, or empty latrine pits." But it's something that we haven't quite figured out. And if you look at just rural sanitation, and our Millennium Development Goals, compared to 2000, we want 50 percent more people having access to sanitation services, but that's just a little building, right? That's just a little outhouse, or whatever it is. What comes after? What happens when the pit is full? And even if you empty the pit, what do you do with the contents? How do you make sure it's safely disposed of? That is an area that hasn't been getting a lot of attention, whether in rural areas or in urban slums. The whole question of fecal sludge management isn't there. The only way I think we're going to solve that is by really making that into a business-driven series of solutions. We are trying to look for some of these solutions and test them.
GRILLOT: So can you tell us a little bit about some of the challenges of that, and whether you're focusing internally on domestic business opportunities? Because you think about these communities you're working in. They're obviously poor communities. And you've written elsewhere that sanitation and poverty, there's this cycle there. They're constantly feeding off each other. In poorer places you find poor sanitation, and in places where you find poor sanitation, you find poverty. So there's this cycle that's perpetuated by these two. So what are the business models that you can produce in poor communities, in places that are struggling because they're experiencing extreme poverty? Or are you looking at people that are going to come in, external investors, capital investment? People that will come in and set up these kinds of businesses and provide these services. What is the strategy that you're using to perpetuate this?
ROSENBOOM: All of the above. It's very clear that we don't have the answer. And there is no such thing as "The Answer." So we're trying different things in different places. I'll try to give you two examples. One where we're looking at the future, what we would like to see develop, and one where we are working right now to make things work better and demonstrate how that can be done. So the right now example is in the city of Dakar in Senegal, where we have invested in setting up a call center for the emptying of septic tanks. That addresses the fact that a) households don't know where to go where they need a service, and b) the service providers don't have a way to reach the households that need service. And there is now a central telephone number and a call center where people call, they say, "I want to have my septic tank emptied. I want to have my pit emptied." And the call center bids out that job to trucks in the area, and the truck operators can bid on that particular demand. And the lowest bidder gets the job. And what has happened over the year and a half that has been in operation is that demand has gone up, so there are more households that actually make the call and bid. Their prices have gone down because the number of jobs that individual operators do has actually gone up with the growing demand. And the amount of fecal sludge that is taken to the treatment plant has gone up as well, to the point where the city-level operator of the treatment plant is a profit-making entity. Before, it wasn't. And they actually just hired a director from outside to help expand this to other areas and improve other parts of the city. So that's a great example where you can say you have a system in place. You have a utility in Dakar where there is a treatment plant. They are private operators, and we have just intervened to help make the system work better. It has led to improvements for everybody. So if you look at the scoring that Water and Sanitation Program has done, the World Bank-affiliated organization that studied fecal sludge management in 10 cities, Dakar comes out as a city that's doing well in terms of its regulatory environment, in terms of its policies and the services available, yet city-wide only 37 percent of all the fecal sludge that they produce is treated. So it's doing well, but it can do better. And we're helping them get there. The future project that we are thinking about is saying imagine that some of the technologies we are developing, which are focused on better emptying of the bits that exist and decentralized treatment, that reclaims useful products from the waste. So we stop considering waste as waste, saying you can generate electricity out of it. We have a unit being tested in Seattle right now that produces 600 kilowatts of electricity and 1,000 gallons of drinking water per hour out of fecal sludge that is fed into the system from 100,000 people, about 20,000 households. Once that is in full commercial production and being used, you would hope that there are entrepreneurs that are willing to invest, and that we would help uncover or establish financing streams that would make possible for these businesses to be set up. To run emptying services, treatment as a profitable business, and that becomes the norm. Or even a government can run a profitable business. And our thinking is that the moment that happens, you change the thinking around sanitation. For the government, it's always a money sink. They can provide services, but it costs money and it doesn't bring in any money. What you see so often is that a loan, let's say from the Asian Development Bank or from the World Bank pays for a treatment center, pays for your infrastructure, and then the maintenance takes money, and the maintenance doesn't happen, so over the years services go down. Now imagine that you change that to a point where you can actually make money out of doing that. And that should make it much more interesting for both governments and private operators to do that. And that's the kind of thing we hope to move to with our investments.
GRILLOT: Well I know you just recently returned from India. So in the few seconds we have left, can you tell us about the importance of the Indian government taking on the sanitation as a project, and what you learned there?
ROSENBOOM: Well, it was absolutely amazing in that the Modi government has said that out of its three priorities in the government, which is getting bank accounts to everybody, improving investment in the country, the third one is sanitation. So Bill and Melinda were both in India as well, and Bill is always saying, "I'm used to telling ministers that sanitation is important," and the extraordinary thing was that all the ministers were telling him how sanitation was, and how much they wanted to work on that. So that was a fantastic change, and one we look forward to working on together with the Modi government.
GRILLOT: Well, I imagine that kind of support is really critical in order to get these things done, when you talk about the demand side, both from the top and bottom. The work you're doing - very interesting. Jan-Willem, thank you for being with us today.
ROSENBOOM: Thanks very much.
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