Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene

Fresh Life Initiative builds healthy, prosperous communities by making safe sanitation, accessible and affordable for everyone, forever - starting with Nairobi, Kenya.

Loowatt develops safe, closed-loop sanitation solutions that provide high-quality access for all. Loowatt's unique toilet system uses patented sealing technology and polymer film to create a waterless “flush", providing the experience of a flush toilet without using water. The proposed project seeks to prove the efficiency and viability of our service model at scale, set to serve 15,000 people (3,000 additional toilets) after two years.

SOIL takes an innovative value-chain approach to solve the sanitation challenge through services specifically designed for dense urban communities where the public health risk is significantly elevated and communicable diseases have the potential to spread rapidly. . With the results-based financing, SOIL expects to reach 8000 households by 2025 in Cap-Haïtien.

Rachel Sklar of Pit Pumpers Ltd. in Rwanda will develop an interactive SMS messaging platform to increase community use of companies to safely empty pit latrines in Rwanda by using communication to increase demand and thereby decrease cost and wait-times for service calls. Pit latrines, used by nearly two billion people worldwide, must be emptied regularly to avoid public health risks associated with fecal contamination of groundwater. Companies in Rwanda provide an emptying service with cost-saving opportunities when several households book together.

Do-yeon Pi of PiQuant in the Republic of Korea is developing a low-cost spectroscopic device and monitoring system, the Water Scanner, that can be nationally deployed to rapidly detect and map Escherichia coli contamination in drinking water in low-resource settings. Water pollution causes up to 90% of diarrheal diseases, which kill 500,000 children under the age of five each year. Water quality is currently measured using spectroscopic devices that are expensive and time-consuming.

Muhamed Bizimana of CARE in the U.S. will establish an electronic system to group urban slum households and connect them with sanitation services and financing options to reduce unsafe dumping of human waste in urban Cote D’Ivoire cities. Sixty percent of urban households in Cote D’Ivoire have unsafe sanitation systems – septic tanks improperly emptied, public dumping of human waste, and open defecation – which causes a serious health threat and limits economic development. A goal has been set for all households to have access to clean drinking water and sanitation by 2030.

Hidenori Harada of Kyoto University in Japan will develop and test a largely automated system for the regular removal and safe disposal of fecal sludge from septic tanks in Asia. Billions of people rely on septic systems to collect human waste. Regular emptying and proper disposal of fecal sludge are critical to avoid potential contamination of clean water by backups, leaks and illegal dumping of waste.

Aart Van den Beukel of Safi Sana in the Netherlands will enable digital monitoring of the entire waste and sanitation supply chain to improve quality control, reduce costs, and help communities transform waste into resources such as agricultural and energy products. Poor sanitation and waste management can drive poverty and disease, but it is difficult to monitor in low-resource settings. The sanitation and waste industry can also provide unique opportunities for social and economic benefit when communities are given access and support.

Caroline Kabaria of the African Population & Health Research Center in Kenya will use geographic information systems (GIS) to map the location of health facilities and community health volunteers in Kenya to identify particularly marginalized slum populations that need better access to health services such as vaccinations. Nairobi and Kisumu contain over 100 slums where residents live in dense and unsanitary conditions. The specific health needs of these residents are difficult to assess from national statistics that often exclude them.

Samuel Dorevitch of the University of Illinois at Chicago in the U.S. will build solar-powered ozonation systems to supply purified water to families living in Kenyan slums. Many peri-urban informal settlements (slums) around the world lack safe, affordable drinking water. In the absence of centralized water purification, methods like chlorination, solar disinfection, and filtration can be used. However, these are time-consuming and expensive, and are generally not monitored for water quality.