iDEas in iNNOVATION

iDE Wins Wharton’s Inaugural Lipman Prize

On Friday April 13, iDE was selected as the winner of the Wharton School’s inaugural Barry and Marie Lipman Family Prize for our innovative, market based water, sanitation & hygiene projects. We’re extremely honored to be the first recipient of this prestigious award!

Here’s a short video produced for the award ceremony:

Lipman Prize Winner: iDE

And here’s the official press release:

Philadelphia, PA, April 13, 2012 – The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania announced today the winner of its inaugural Barry & Marie Lipman Family Prize – iDE, a social enterprise that has pioneered innovative, market-based approaches to safe water and sanitation access. Chosen from hundreds of organizations worldwide devoted to social impact and building sustainable solutions for social and economic challenges, iDE received $100,000 and bragging rights at a gala marking the event’s culmination last night at the Wharton School. iDE and the two other finalist organizations, KOMAZA, a pioneering forestry social enterprise, and MedShare, a distributor of surplus medical supplies, will all profit from unprecedented, synergistic opportunities with Penn and Wharton.

“The $100,000 is one thing but the partnership with Penn and Wharton is just absolutely outstanding,” said Cordell Jacks, the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WaSH) Program Co-Director at iDE. “We really believe that we’re going to change the world with toilets and we think that a partnership here is going to bring together great people, creative ideas and really solve a global public health challenge, something that is very finite and can be achieved in our lifetime. So it’s just really exciting to do this together with the University.”

About the 2012 Lipman Family Prize Winner:
iDE is an international nonprofit organization helping poor rural households in the developing world to access the tools and knowledge they need to increase their income. iDE’s productive water solutions create and increase both food production and incomes, and with innovative drinking water and sanitation technologies, iDE gives rural households the basis for healthier and more dignified livelihoods.

iDE’s involvement with improved sanitation began in Cambodia, which has 16 percent sanitation coverage. Cambodia has the second to worst rural sanitation coverage outside of Africa, at only eight percent. Furthermore, Cambodia loses approximately seven percent of its GDP, USD $448 million per year, due to poor sanitation. iDE Cambodia’s Sanitation Marketing Program (SanMark) recently reached the milestone of 10,000 latrines sold and, in 2011, the organization was awarded a major grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Stone Family Foundation and the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) to scale the SanMark approach nationally in Cambodia, targeting an additional 160,000 households. Building further on these successes in Cambodia, iDE has recently secured funding for WaSH activities in Bangladesh and Nepal with a $400,000 UNICEF-funded scoping and piloting project utilizing the model and support of iDE Cambodia to promote both water filters and low cost, sanitary latrines.

About the Lipman Family Prize:
Currently in its inaugural year, the annual Lipman Family Prize has been made possible by a $6.5 million gift from Wharton alumnus Barry R. Lipman and his wife, Marie.

“For more than ten years, I have had a strong desire to impact the non-profit/social responsibility sector,” said Barry R. Lipman, co-founder of California law firm Goldfarb Lipman. “Through a partnership with the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School, my dream has been realized with the awarding of the first Lipman Family Prize. Penn and I eagerly look forward to annually honoring an organization whose mission is to improve the lives of those less fortunate.”

Administered by the University of Pennsylvania through the Wharton School, the Lipman Family Prize is governed by an interdisciplinary Steering Committee comprised of faculty, and staff from across the University of Pennsylvania, drawing upon the expertise of such entities as the Center for High Impact Philanthropy, Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management, the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, and the School of Social Policy and Practice.

The selection of Prize finalists involved a Student Selection Committee that reviewed initial submissions and conducted the due diligence process under staff guidance, and a Prize Committee that selected the finalists and chose the winner.

“This is the beginning of a long partnership with iDE, KOMAZA and MedShare as new members of the Wharton and Penn community,” said Thomas S. Robertson, the dean of the Wharton School. “The possibilities of these cross-sector collaborations are powerful and we look forward to our ongoing role in fostering sustainable new solutions for the advancement of society as a whole.”

For more information on the 2012 Lipman Family Prize and to view videos from the March 2012 site visits to the three finalist organizations, visit www.wharton.upenn.edu/lipmanfamilyprize.

World Water Day 2012 day of service – in Denver today, March 22!

I’m sitting here at Green Spaces Denver, campaign headquarters for our Water4Food 2012 day of service in honor of United Nations World Water Day, which this year is focused on food security. As our readers know, that’s iDE’s main focus.

There’s a lot of excitement and momentum from volunteers showing up to help spread the word in our local community.  We’re going out and hitting the streets with postcards, stickers, tee shirts to share facts like these:

Did you know that it takes 635 gallons of water to produce one hamburger? Or that 397 gallons of water are needed to produce 35 oz of cane sugar? The truth is, without water there is no food. Water scarcity already affects every continent and more than 40 percent of the people on our planet. This year’s International World Water Day focuses on the critical relationship between water access and food security.

iDE, along with Card Gnome, Green Spaces, and our event sponsors, brings Water4Food 2012 to the Denver area to raise awareness for this issue and money to prevent famine for families in West Africa.

What can individuals do?

• follow a healthier, sustainable diet;
• consume less water-intensive products;
• reduce the scandalous food wastage: 30% of the food produced worldwide is never eaten and the water used to produce it is definitively lost!
• produce more food, of better quality, with less water.

Join Us
There’s still time to volunteer! If you can spend a couple of hours taking stickers and information sheets to Denver area businesses, sign up at volunteer.water4food.com. All volunteers are invited to join us at the Water4Food 2012 party tonight at 5:30pm at Green Spaces.

Can’t volunteer?
Purchase a Water4Food 2012 greeting card plan at Card Gnome, and 50% of the proceeds will provide families in the Sahel region of West Africa with the tools and knowledge needed to create and sustain a sustainable income from small plot farming, enabling them to increase food security and lift themselves out of poverty.

Your plan allows you to send 25 cards throughout one year. You choose the perfect card from Card Gnome’s selection of thousands of cards for all occasions; write your personal message and Card Gnome mails it for you. You can even schedule cards for delivery a year in advance.

With the purchase of a card plan, you gain a ticket with a guest to the party at Green Spaces tonight. Just show up and we’ll have your name on a list along with others.

If you would like to donate directly to iDE, please click here.

There are many ways to get involved in this issue, no matter where you are!

Visit the U.N.’s World Water Day site (www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/) to find World Water Day events all over the world, downloadable informational materials and more.

Twitter: Join the conversation using #Water4Food and #WorldWaterDay and give a shout to @CardGnome and @ideorg or any of the other great sponsors listed below.

Facebook: We love sharing water4food information and you can visit our pages to access videos, pictures, blog posts and other items we’ve been sharing recently:
https://www.facebook.com/ideorg
https://www.facebook.com/cardgnome

Our Sponsors:

Green Spaces  greenspaceshome.com
Silver Bullet Water Treatment, LLC  silverbulletcorp.com
Colorado Water 2012  water2012.org
Colorado Public Television 12  cpt12.org
Elephant Energy  elephantenergy.org
Inspire Commerce  inspirecommerce.com
Edge of Seven  edgeofseven.org
Ellen Bruss Design   ebd.com
Conscious Coffees   consciouscoffees.com
Sticker Giant   stickergiant.com
Rage Unlimited   rageunlimited.com
Runa Tea Company   runa.org

I’m incredibly inspired by all of these volunteers who are taking time out of their busy days to help us tackle this issue.  Thank you to our sponsors, partners staff, volunteers, and news media who are working hard to spread the word on this very important day.

iDE Honored as Top “WaSH” Org

iDE has just been named one of the top ten international organizations working in the field of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WaSH) based on a survey of experts in the field. The list was compiled by Philanthropedia/GuideStar, an information service specializing in reporting on U.S. non-profit companies.

Philanthropedia asked 116 WASH experts (funders, researchers, nonprofit senior staff, consultants, and others) from 90 organizations to identify nonprofit orgs that were making the biggest positive impact in the field. A total of 106 organizations were reviewed.

In their anonymous reviews, the experts cited iDE’s focus on “systemic change through market development of pro-poor technology as foundational to its widespread impact”. One expert wrote that “iDE doesn’t want to be a long-term service provider. In its best work, it refines a pro-poor technology, develops a market for that technology, supports business development to provide the technology, and then backs out to let the market drive the availability of the technology.”

For more than 15 years, iDE has pioneered innovative, market-based approaches to safe water and sanitation access. These approaches exploit the comparative advantage of private-sector, NGO, and government stakeholders to reach large numbers of poor households cost effectively and in short timeframes. iDE has successfully applied these approaches in promoting water filters, latrines, hand pumps, and behavior change in rural Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. In Cambodia, for instance, iDE’s sanitation marketing program recently enabled local enterprises to sell 17,400 latrines without subsidy in a one-year period, won the International Design Excellence Award, and was inducted into the World Toilet Organization Hall of Fame.

To read more about what experts in the field have to say about us, click on the Expert Reviews section on our organization profile here.

Learn more about iDE Cambodia’s WaSH program here.

More here on the history of WaSH at iDE.

Give Me A Place to Squat

From iDE CEO Al Doerksen, on World Toilet Day 2011

In one of my former lives, I (and my family) spent three years in India. Our work took us all over the country, both urban and rural areas. I still remember driving the country roads in the dusk of early evenings, and seeing sari-clad women walking along the road with brass containers in their hands. They were headed out to the fields to the privacy afforded by the darkness so they could finally, at the end of the day, perform their daily ablutions, as they were called. Somehow they had waited the entire day before they could finally seek relief.

Talk about defecation, taking a crap, or taking a shit is not polite dinner-time conversation. It may not even be polite for a blog seeking readers who appreciate a measure of respectability. But that is part of the problem. Even though most of us hope for the regularity which allows for a daily movement of our bowels, it is not usual to discuss it. And the fact that we don’t talk about or even acknowledge that we did or didn’t crap today has contributed to not addressing the problem of one billion people who still defecate in the open every day! We are going to have to start talking about this so we can get on to addressing the issue.

iDE has been involved in sanitation marketing in Vietnam and Cambodia for several years, and successfully so, but I wasn’t always been convinced that iDE with its income creation mission should be involved in water & sanitation programs. I have changed my mind. I’ll tell you why.

It’s a health issue. Open defecation and unsanitary latrines are a huge source of fecal matter in food which then leads to diarrheal disease. Never mind the inconvenience this causes adults, diarrheal disease kills more than 1.5 million children a year! It’s incredibly sad to lose a little person in this way! The grandfather in me can easily identify with this pain.

It’s a women’s issue. Women should not have to suffer the indignity, the inconvenience and the personal safety risks associated with open (field) defecation. They should also not have to wait until nightfall to deal with their daily physical routines.

It’s a children’s issue. Chronic diarrhea can hinder child development by impeding the uptake of essential nutrients that are critical to the development of children’s minds, bodies, and immune systems. Reduced incidence of diarrhea has the effect of increasing school attendance, especially for girls.

It’s an economic issue. In a recent policy statement, the Gates Foundation estimated that the economic benefits of improved sanitation can reach $9 for every dollar invested by increasing people’s productivity, reducing healthcare costs, and preventing illness, disability, and early death. For an organization like iDE with a focus on creating income opportunities, this is huge.

It’s a market opportunity. Several years ago, iDE Vietnam engaged in a project to help local suppliers construct and supply low cost latrines through the local market place. A post-project evaluation conducted 3 years after the close of the project showed that high latrine sales rates continued even though the project was long over. More recently, iDE Cambodia working with an IDEO product designer developed a simple, award winning “easy latrine.” In the first year after this was introduced to local producers and marketers, more than 10,000 units were sold and installed (and are now in daily use). These units sell because they align with the value structure of our customers.

iDE is gratified to report that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Stone Family Foundation, and the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program have recognized iDE’s leadership and proficiency in sanitation marketing with $6 million in grant funding to expand our work in Southeast Asia. We are poised to also move into Nepal, Bangladesh, and several African markets.

iDE Launches New Toilet Project

Lack of access to sanitation is a major problem affecting the developing world. Poor sanitation is a major cause of diarrheal disease, lost labor productivity for adults, missed school days for children, and additional financial burdens for families requiring medical treatment. In Cambodia alone, diarrheal diseases account for 17 percent of deaths in children under five. The World Bank recently estimated the annual economic loss due to poor sanitation there to be $448 million a year, which is equivalent to 7.2 percent of GDP.

Existing markets for rural sanitation in the developing world are woefully underdeveloped. Low demand and weak supply chains hinder the availability of sanitation products and services. Publicly funded sanitation projects often make extensive use of hardware subsidies with disappointing results; typically, only a fraction of the subsidy reaches the intended target group, and recipients often do not use or maintain their latrines over time.

For a number of years now in Asia, iDE has been at the forefront of Sanitation Marketing developments to address these challenges. iDE recently completed a pilot project in Cambodia that exceeded expectations by enabling 9.6 percent of the rural population to purchase sanitary latrines in eleven target districts over a 16-month period.

Now, a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made it possible to expand these achievements on a national scale, improving the sanitation conditions of tens of thousands of rural households while stimulating vibrant and sustainable sanitation markets. Over a three-year period, the Cambodia Sanitation Marketing Scale-Up Project will build on the original pilot project by working directly with some 90 local enterprises, encouraging them to invest their own resources into addressing the demand for sanitary latrines.

The project will enable 115,000 households in 60 districts of Cambodia to purchase affordable sanitary latrines. Other outcomes include:

• Improved latrine designs for two “challenging environments”

• Sanitation financing mechanisms for consumer households and supply chain enterprises

• A research and training center to become a global dissemination platform for Sanitation Marketing experience

The total cost of the project is estimated at $6,942,199. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded iDE a grant of $3,987,717. Other key partners in the project include the Stone Family Foundation, the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program, PATH, and the Royal Government of Cambodia.

Sanitation Marketing has emerged as a highly effective approach for rapidly and sustainably improving rural sanitation at scale by connecting consumers with products that they want and can afford. Evidence from a number of recent projects demonstrates that stimulating private enterprises to address the untapped rural sanitation market can have a revolutionary impact on the uptake of sanitary latrines—with associated health and financial gains for rural households.

The Sanitation Marketing model leverages the advantages of private sector entities, civil society, and government to reach large numbers of rural households in short time frames. Donor funds are not used to provide direct subsidies for hardware or installation. Instead they are invested in laying the foundations for demand-driven, self-financing market systems.

Broadly, Sanitation Marketing applies iDE’s market-based poverty alleviation approach to the related problem of inadequate sanitation. First, we develop a deep understanding of the target group’s needs and aspirations, and adapt or design affordable technology options to meet those needs. We strengthen the capacity of local enterprises to manufacture and deliver the technologies, conduct social marketing campaigns to encourage the purchase and proper use of the technologies, and coordinate with NGOs, microfinance institutions, and government agencies to extend scale and to reach poorer households.

Designing for the Rest of the World

From Paul Polak’s Blog, guest bloggers Kali Friedmann and Danny Growald give an overview of the Design for the Other 90%, with some ideas about how to (and how not to) design for the developing world:

“Design for the Other 90%” Comes to Denver
By Kali Friedmann and Danny Growald

The Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt “Design for the Other 90%” exhibit has arrived at RedLine Gallery in downtown Denver, showcasing products designed explicitly to fit the needs and circumstances of the world’s poorest customers – the “other 90%” who are bypassed by current design processes.

The exhibit, organized in part by International Development Enterprises (iDE), showcases products from an array of designers, engineers, and organizations focused on development, including the Design Revolution (D-REV), the non-profit technology incubator co-founded by Paul Polak. D-REV is an outgrowth of Dr. Polak’s vision of fomenting a revolution in how companies design, price, market, and distribute their products, to produce radically affordable income generating technologies for customers living on less than $4 a day.

Products like D-REV’s Jaipur Knee (a simple prosthetic knee that costs $25 to make and retails for $80) and low-cost ceramic water filters from iDE and other organizations, help illustrate the types of technologies that – at the right price and combined with appropriate mechanisms for marketing and distribution – have the potential to leverage the power of the market to reach large-scale impact.

Kamal using the Jaipur Knee (YouTube)

True to RedLine’s mission of merging art, education, and community, these low cost technologies are displayed throughout the gallery along with the creative responses of seven local artists to poverty, waste, and the challenges of design for development. One such work, created by RedLine resident artist Viviane Le Courtois, emphasizes the disparity between the bottom 90% of the world’s citizens in dire need of practical design solutions, and the top 10% who are served by the majority of designers and live surrounded by excess. The product of several weeks of work, many gallons of Elmer’s glue, and the waste from a covey of Le Courtois’ friends, it is a round thatched-roof hut made entirely of shredded junk mail.

On the exhibit’s opening day, reporter Ryan Warner from the Colorado Public Radio program Colorado Matters met Dr. Polak at the gallery for a walk-through interview. True to form, Dr. Polak provided both a clear description of the design process required to create meaningful and effective tools for development, and an honest critique of the difficulties inherent in doing so.

Dr. Polak highlighted the importance of talking to customers and building not only radical affordability into design – a primary and thoroughly non-negotiable requirement – but also taking into account the much less obvious cultural and lifestyle factors of the communities being served. Failure to take into account details about social structure, cultural preferences, and the subtleties of life at the local level often results in the failure of the project as a whole. As an outsider, this requires a deep cultural understanding that can only be attained by spending time on the ground listening to the needs of users early on in the design process. A full explanation of Dr. Polak’s 12 Steps for Practical Problem Solving can be found in his book, Out of Poverty, but the first three are crucial, and, while they seem obvious, are often overlooked:

• Go to where the action is.
• Talk to the people who have the problem and listen to what they say.
• Learn everything you can about the problem’s specific context.

For example, there’s the Q Drum – a doughnut-shaped water transportation vessel that can be rolled to and from a water source with a rope tied through the center. Sounds great, looks cool, but, 1) at more than $70 per unit it’s too expensive for poor customers, and there’s no way for it to pay for itself, 2) the ropes tend to wear out quickly, and it’s unusable without a way to pull it, and, 3) the opening in the container is too large, making the water vulnerable to contamination from hands reaching inside or dirt finding its way in (80% of the contamination of bad water occurs during transportation between source and end-user). These sorts of problems can only be understood and solved by designing for affordability, spending time on the ground with users, doing a lot of listening, and continually iterating in response to feedback.

Developing countries are littered with well-intentioned but eventually useless products ostensibly designed with poor people in mind, but without their consultation or true knowledge of their needs. A classic example in this category is the PlayPump, a product that is not part of the Cooper-Hewitt exhibit. Designed like a manual merry-go-round, as children run and spin on it the device pumps water into a storage tank for later use. Harnessing the power of children at play to pump water for the village conjures up a lovely image of a type that often appeals to Western donors. As a result the project (run by PlayPumps International) received tremendous press coverage and raised over $60 million dollars to build 4,000 pumps in villages in Southern Africa.

Yet in just a few months it became clear that the project was an abject failure. In the absence of expertise or funding for maintenance of the devices, technical malfunctions were never resolved, and water ceased to flow. After a period of initial excitement, children for the most part lost interest and stopped using the toy, leaving women to spin the PlayPump themselves. Imagine a seventy-year-old woman, after a full day’s work, having to single-handedly spin this large toy that replaced her simple hand-pump just to get the water she and her family need. It’s this type of problem, rooted in the failure to connect with the customer, which designers working for the bottom 90% must avoid by beginning the design process on the ground, listening to the people for whom the product is being created.

By contrast, the treadle pump created by iDE has proven to have a higher output of water than the work put into it. As a result of that efficiency, of its low cost (around $25), and an effective marketing and distribution system involving troubadours singing its praises and local artisans manufacturing and selling the pumps, over 3 million units have been sold throughout the developing world, helping many millions of people increase their incomes by cultivating higher-value, off-season fruits and vegetables. It’s affordable, reliable, leads directly to increased income (and pays for itself several times in the first year), and it’s so efficient it allows men, women, and children alike to pump water without breaking a sweat.

Which brings me to my one and only point of contention with Mr. Warner: I was witness to the fact that at age seventy-seven, Dr. Polak was able to consistently and almost effortlessly operate the treadle pump, and simultaneously talk about it without skipping a beat – much less “appearing out of breath.”

The Cooper-Hewitt Design for the Other 90% exhibit will be at RedLine through Sunday, September 25th, 2011. RedLine is located at 2350 Arapahoe Street in downtown Denver.

Click here for the full interview with Paul Polak that aired on Colorado Matters Wednesday, July 13.

Art is Creative Problem Solving

“Design is creative problem solving. Art is creative problem solving.”

So says iDE founder Paul Polak in a new interview with Colorado Public Radio’s Ryan Warner. Paul gives the reporter a guided tour of the just-opened Design for the Other 90% exhibit–along with a demonstration of a treadle pump in action!–while covering such topics as how iDE came about, the role of design in improving livelihoods in developing countries, why we don’t give products away, and what a collection of affordable technologies is doing in an art gallery.

You can stream the full interview here.

Phnom-enal

Here is the latest newsletter from iDE Senior Advisor Andrew Romanoff:

What do you get when you cross a shower and a latrine? If you answered “an episode of Seinfeld,” you’ve been watching too many reruns. (That was my guess, too.)

In Cambodia, relieving yourself is no laughing matter. Sanitation-related illnesses claim more than 1,000 lives every month. And at $300, the price of a typical toilet exceeds most Cambodians’ annual income.

That’s why, as I reported in January, our team in Phnom Penh has been promoting a low-cost alternative: the $35 Easy Latrine. The device is manufactured locally and can be installed in a single day; 11,500 have already been sold.

Now the same crew is testing another vital innovation: a combination latrine/shower/drip-irrigation system. Click on the video below to learn how the Easy Shower may make thousands of Cambodians better off (and George Costanza awfully jealous).

MANHATTAN AND MARS

In my last newsletter, I suggested some reasons Americans should take an interest in the rest of the world. Our economy and our national security, I contended, are inextricably linked to our neighbors’ fortunes. Most respondents agreed.

“Prosperous nations tend to start fewer wars,” wrote Larry Kaufman, a “semi-retired journalist” and former railroad executive from Genesee. “They also make better customers than do poor nations.”

My friend and former colleague, Col. Joe Rice, reflected on his five tours of duty in Iraq. “Poverty, lack of education, and lack of opportunity are the main drivers of instability and terrorism,” he wrote. “A little money spent on international relief and development is in our own national interest.”

Then he added, “Oh, it probably is morally right as well.”

George Schumm, a professor of logic in Ohio, underlined that point: “A suffering human being is a suffering human being, and it matters not, from a moral perspective, whether it’s your suffering, that of your child, or neighbor, or fellow citizen, or someone living on Mars.”

None of these arguments, however, swayed a reader on the East Coast. “I don’t care about this,” a man named Aaron declared. “I live in New York.”

I’ll give another New Yorker the last word. In an article published in Outside Magazine in 2009, Nicholas Kristof, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author, explained why some causes (the plight of a homeless hawk on the Upper East Side of Manhattan) attract more attention than others (the genocide in Darfur).

“We intervene,” Mr. Kristof wrote, “not because of stories of desperate circumstances but when we can be cheered up with positive stories of success and transformation.… The irony: Altruism creates its own selfish reward. Or, to put it another way, nobody gains more selfish pleasure than those who act selflessly.”

(You can read Mr. Kristof’s article by clicking here.)

UPCOMING EVENTS

I’ll be sharing other stories of IDE’s success in the weeks ahead. Please join me to learn more about our work and how you can get involved:

• Denver Mile High Rotary Club, Wednesday, April 6, 7 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., University Club, 1673 Sherman St., Denver.
• Castle Rock High Noon Rotary Club, Thursday, April 7, 12 p.m., Philip S. Miller Library, 100 S. Wilcox St., Castle Rock.
• Brown-Bag Lunch, Monday, April 11, 12 p.m. to 1 p.m., at IDE, 3rd floor conference room, 10403 W. Colfax Ave, Lakewood. (Please note new date.) This month’s discussion will focus on Latin America.
• Denver West Rotary Club, Tuesday, April 12, 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., Rolling Hills Country Club, 15707 W. 26th Ave., Golden.
• Denver Cherry Creek Rotary Club, Tuesday, April 19, 7 a.m., Inn at Cherry Creek, 233 Clayton St., Denver.

To schedule a presentation, contact Michelle Warner at mwarner@ideorg.org. To volunteer, contact Dana Cousteau at volunteers@ideorg.org.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Andrew Romanoff

Success: It’s in the toilet

10,000 of them, actually. Congratulations to IDE Cambodia, for facilitating sales of 10,000 IDE EZ Latrines in just over a year.

IDE Cambodia staff celebrate the 10,000 Easy Latrine milestone

Here’s the full story from IDE Cambodia:

Phnom Penh, Cambodia – January 14, 2011 – In only a little over a year, IDE’s Sanitation Marketing Project in Cambodia has reached a landmark of 10,000 latrines sold. This marks more latrines sold in the project areas in the past year than in the last four years combined, a tremendous step forward in public health for a country where only 18 percent of the rural population has access to a toilet.

What is even more remarkable about the Sanitation Marketing Project’s success is that all the latrines were sold without any price subsidy. Instead, the Sanitation Marketing Project has applied market principles and world-class product design to the challenge of rural sanitation in Cambodia.

A common local latrine, which could run up to $150, was well beyond the means of the average rural Cambodian, whose average annual income is a mere $135. With help from IDEO designer Jeff Chapin, IDE redesigned the latrine to make it more user-friendly—easy to buy, easy to build, and easy to use. The resulting “Easy Latrine” costs only about $35 and can be assembled by the families themselves in a day.

“The project began by treating people as customers rather than beneficiaries of charity,” said Michael Roberts, Country Director for IDE Cambodia, “and we have seen that many rural Cambodians are able and willing to pay for something that delivers real value.”

The latrine redesign is integrated with a social marketing campaign to stimulate demand. By marketing the latrine as a status product instead of lecturing people about the health woes of defecating in the fields, the Sanitation Marketing Project triggered people’s universal desire for “keeping up with the Joneses.”

Previously an unsexy product, the rapid growth in demand is now being met by local entrepreneurs in the latrine supply chain who have been trained by IDE in efficient production methods, business skills, and proactive methods for generating sales. There are now 22 Easy Latrine producers, who have inspired ambitious competitors to also join in the booming latrine market.

Not only has the Sanitation Marketing Project made tremendous strides in improving rural sanitation in Cambodia, it has done so by leveraging the market and improving the livelihoods of local entrepreneurs. The program has been recognized internationally for its success, winning the International Design Excellence Award and recently being inducted to the World Toilet Organization’s Hall of Fame.

The Water Malthusians

From IDE CEO Al Doerksen’s blog:

I grew up in a family with eight kids. We never had a lot of money but I don’t recall thinking we were poor. We did have water restrictions however. We bathed once a week in 3 to 4 inches of shared water, and just urinating in the single toilet was not sufficient rationale to flush. The driver for some of these family rules were not water scarcity – it was a captive sewage system that had grossly inadequate absorptive capacity especially in our frozen Alberta winters. Water consumption, however, was never an articulated concern in my growing up years; we added ice cubes and tea bags and instant coffee as often as we wished, and the hoses ran freely when flooding the community hockey rink. In our local Mennonite church, water was a symbol of everlasting life and the medium of baptism.

Well, that was fifty years ago; now I enjoy my daily showers; I have graduated to double espressos and I no longer play ice hockey but I must confess that concerns about excessive flushing are still in my psyche. In terms of its psycho-metaphorical value, water thoughts seem to generate more feelings of guilt than grace.

The water messages these days are not encouraging. So many dire predictions from the water Malthusians. Water tables are dropping. The world is running out of fresh water. We’ve got a time bomb. Our water is getting more and more polluted with agricultural pesticide and herbicide run off, and industrial complexes still flush without abandon. The next wars will allegedly be fought over access to water, and every double espresso I consume uses up 140 litres of water. Eating beef is even worse – one kilo is like consuming 16,000 litres of water – enough water to fill the pool we no longer own. I am part of the fortunate middle class world which owns a completely unsustainable water footprint – 2500 cubic meters per person per year. One could drown in the statistics (and in the empty water bottles), and to change metaphors, all of this gives me a headache; I wish it was just the consequence of dehydration on a hot day.

My first water career was with Trojan Technologies, winner of the 2009 World Water Week Industry Award for its global leadership in the development of large scale ultraviolet water disinfection systems. Our concerns were about safe (chlorine-free) drinking water, about safe discharges of waste water back into the environment, the removal and destruction of industrial contaminants in the ground water and river systems. I was based in Europe; the EU Water Frameworks look at water from a river basis perspective. The Rhine is used for agriculture, fisheries, industry, transportation, recreation and tourism and using its water must accommodate the interests of all.

My second water career is with IDE. We encourage the productive use of water; in our experience irrigation is one of the best leverage opportunities available for smallplot dollar-a-day farmers. We offer affordable technologies to pump/lift water, store water and distribute water. The trouble with irrigation, however, is that is uses water – on average 6 litres per sq meter per day in irrigation season. Some days this feels perverse; in a water stressed world, we are promoting the use of more of it. We are not likely to be able to wean ourselves off food and water, however, so our focus, especially in agriculture, which uses 70% of available fresh water supplies will increasing promote the more careful stewardship of this resource.

Some 200 years ago, Malthus predicted that exponential increases in population would outstrip arithmetic increases in food supply, and that dire consequences would occur. So far, he has been wrong, and to some extent, our ability with technology and innovation to grow more food has been a big part of the solution. To some extent, these problem solving successes cause us to want to underestimate the challenges emerging.

For some water organizations, this emerging water stress is the imperative and rationale for fundraising. “One billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation, specifically a toilet. But there is good news – by giving $20 you can provide one person with clean water for 20 years.”

A less trite approach is found in the recently published IWMI report “Water for Food, Water for Life.” While acknowledging the challenge faced, the report argues “The hope lies in closing the gap in agricultural productivity in many parts of the world … and in realizing the unexplored potential that lies in better water management along with non-miraculous changes in policy and production techniques. The world has enough freshwater to produce food for all its people over the next half century. But world leaders must take action now—before the opportunities to do so are lost.”

At IDE we will continue to pursue innovative approaches to more responsible use of productive water. We want to use statistics responsibly. So far it is not yet easily possible to destroy matter as so many of the water Malthusians seem to imply. On the other hand, we will deepen our inquiries about falling water tables.

And I will continue to be conscious of my flushing habits.