By Lindsay Stradley, Co-Founder of Acumen investment Sanergy
Let’s talk shit.
As the mother of two toddlers, I discuss poop at home, all the time — it’s an endless source of fascination. Long after my kids’ have moved on to the next topic, I continue those poop discussions at work. As a Co-Founder of Sanergy, I design ways for cities to systematically manage all of their poop.
A city is a system of networks, connecting residents to services and to each other. But what happens when one of these networks is missing? What happens when they’re all missing?
I’ve lived through that once, in New Orleans, when Hurricane Katrina struck the city. No power, no phones, no water. Impassably flooded roads. The city ground to a halt. As people returned home and ripped out wet floorboards and molded walls, the trash piled up in yards and sidewalks, spilling into roads and blocking cars. I remember that winter as uncharacteristically cold, without gas to heat homes. And in a city known for late nights, everyone returned early to homes without lights.
Six years later, after finishing graduate school, I moved to Nairobi, Kenya — one city with two very different faces. For half of the population, it’s a gleaming city with super highways, high-speed internet, ride-share apps, wind power running through the grid, and clean water flowing through the taps. But, where I work, in the informal settlements, Nairobi reminds me more of post-Katrina New Orleans, where residents are disconnected from networks and services. There are a lot of cold, dark evenings.
Mukuru, an informal settlement in southeast Nairobi that’s smaller than New York’s Central Park, is home to an estimated half a million residents. In place of piped water, vendors sell water by the jerrycan. The sewers surround the outsides of the community, but don’t penetrate inside. The electricity grid, while visible, does not serve most of the area, so many residents find DIY-ways to connect themselves. Mukuru is an ecosystem of a resilient people that make the best of what they have.
One of those people is Brenda Mwelu, a young mother who, even after finishing college, had a hard time finding work. In Kenya, nearly half of all youth are unemployed. In search of jobs and a better life, more Brendas keep moving to the city. This is a global trend: the population is set to double from 1 billion today to more than 2 billion by 2050 in urban slums.
Traditional service delivery cannot keep pace with these growing populations. Fortunately, Nairobi has made big strides in bridging some of these gaps, changing the very nature of how systems are built: wireless mobile networks, solar power grids, and pay-as-you-go water provision.
But one network is still largely missing: sanitation.
In 2012, I met Hannah Muthoni, a grandmother who has lived in Mukuru most of her life. To take care of her family, she would travel more than an hour to hawk goods at a market. Every day, she set aside some of her earnings so that her family could gain access to a toilet. In slums, this is commonplace.
Residents pay to access really crappy sanitation. The toilet Hannah’s family used, the only one in their neighborhood, was a shabby and unhygienic pit. At night, when it wasn’t safe to venture out to these toilets, Hannah and her family would resort to ‘flying toilets’ — defecating in a plastic bag, then in the morning, tactfully throwing it outside when no one is looking.
Without a proper sanitation network, other networks can’t fully function. Just as the detritus of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans spilled onto the streets, slowing traffic and spreading mold, the flying toilets littering Nairobi’s slums, and streams of shit running through them slow business and sap communities’ health. According to Kenya’s own Sanitation & Hygiene Policy, the country’s economy loses $1 million a day because of this. Without good sanitation, the web of networks starting to bridge slum residents to services is shattered. And even more so as cities grow.
So, let’s talk shit. Let’s talk about systems failure. Why haven’t we seen progress on sanitation? I see three reasons.
First, let’s look in the mirror: we have it too easy. We flush and forget. We know there’s some system deep underground that will deal with it. This very absence of shit in our conscious lives can be seen in the absence of any adequate word to discuss it: Feces, excreta, turds, poop, doodoo.
Unless you are talking to a toddler, there’s no perfect word for a discussion on human waste. They’re too profane, too technical, or too childish — even though this is a subject we all encounter every day. Without a word, without a collective conversation, we’re not developing a broad societal awareness of the need for better handling of our shit.
Second, let’s face it, it’s just not sexy. Who wants to deal with shit when you can fund wells that provide beautiful, clean water? Those of us who work in sanitation do a bad job of selling the impact. As young people decide their career paths, developing economies craft their budgets, and philanthropists prioritize their giving, shit isn’t high on their lists.
Third, and finally, let’s talk dollars and cents. It would seem that the only solution is massive sewer systems. Across the United States, aging sewer systems are being repaired at a cost of billions of dollars each. Now, imagine the enormity of that problem — and the corresponding bill — in a city without any sewer system at all.
With people unable to relate to the problem, unmoved to solve it, or overwhelmed by its magnitude, progress is stagnant. Half the world’s residents have been left disconnected, living in communities full of shit, with no network or services to safely remove and treat it. This disconnect impacts everything: health, the environment, the economy, and education.
Women and girls are especially vulnerable to poor sanitation — a gender disparity that plays out all too clearly in education. In Mukuru, Janet Lwoyelo, a teacher, set up her own school to give the kids a learning space. But with two dilapidated pit latrines as the only sanitation options at the school, the dirty toilets made kids sick. Adolescent girls were particularly vulnerable during menstruation. With no safe place to go, they would skip school altogether.
The causes and consequences are clear. Now, the solutions. What can we do?
We could spend billions of dollars and mobilize millions of people to relocate so that we could install massive sewer systems. But we don’t have the time, space, or money to do that.
Today’s cities need a new plan. We need to build new types of systems — designed for the modern world of rapid urbanization and impending water scarcity. The good news is cities around the world, from Durban to Manila to Nairobi, are now innovating, creating sanitation networks to solve the scarcity challenges of the modern urban world.
My company, Sanergy, takes a systems-based approach to solving the sanitation challenge. We build a dense network of low-cost, high-quality, waterless toilets that we franchise to community members who run them as businesses, to landowners who include them for residential tenants, and to schools who provide them to students.
We then collect all of the waste, taking it out of the community, and convert it into valuable products, such as fertilizer that is helping thousands of farmers to increase their yields and incomes, as well as addressing local food security issues. Every single day, our network serves more than 55,000 residents with safe sanitation — for the very first time.
People like Hannah and her family now have 24-hour access to safe sanitation. In schools like Janet’s, we have seen a 20 percent increase in enrollment and attendance. Young girls now have a dignified space to take care of their needs and don’t have to miss school anymore.
We have also created hundreds of jobs, filled by young people like our teammate, Brenda, who earns a good income to support her family, and has even invested in Sanergy toilets for her neighbors.
Models like ours raise the bar for innovation and lower the cost of providing sanitation at scale. In fact, our solutions solve the time, space, and money constraints that hinder big infrastructure. Rather than taking years or even decades to lay sewer lines, we expedite that growth curve to weeks. Our facilities fit into even the most crowded neighborhoods, so space is never an issue. By building an efficient service delivery network and creating products valued by customers at both ends of the value chain — urban residents and rural farmers — Sanergy’s model cuts the cost of providing safe sanitation to one fifth the cost of building and maintaining sewers.
It’s inspiring, but not a panacea. Our solution must be one of many built into modern sanitation networks. And those networks must be built by governments, private sector, and civil society working together.
For cities to thrive, we need smarter systems and how to build sustainable networks that will service the cities of tomorrow. We need everyone to sit at the table and talk about shit — so that as young people decide their career paths, developing economies craft their budgets, and philanthropists develop their priorities, they all give a shit.
This is an abbreviated transcript of Lindsay’s TED talk, which she gave at TEDWomen in New Orleans of November 2017.
