The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been a major role-player at AfricaSan 3 in Rwanda, using the gathering to announce its new sanitation-focused global development strategy and award new grants. AllAfrica's Julie Frederikse interviews Frank Rijsberman, director of the foundation's Water, Sanitation and Hygiene initiative. He has publicly stated that his department expects to be one of the key funders for innovation in this sector.
What is the Gates Foundation's view of the importance of the AfricanSan conference?
We think that the Kigali conference is important because it emphasizes sanitation and the five-year drive to catch up on the MDG (Millennium Development Goal) in sanitation, which is very much in line with our new sanitation-focused strategy. After a review process we concluded that sanitation is a neglected priority where we can make a difference. We feel it is smart investment which can deliver a huge impact.
Often people don't realise this because of the taboos around talking openly about sanitation, but no other innovation has saved so many lives, ever since flush toilets changed sanitation in Europe, North America and other parts of the world.
What do you think of the approach being taken by the African team that won a grant in the foundation's "Reinventing the Toilet" challenge: the University of KwaZulu Natal and its partner, the Durban municipality, eThekwini?
We think this is a great example of the kind of innovation in sanitation that should be pursued. We think, along with Neil Macleod (head of eThekwini Water and Sanitation), that the world needs to a toilet that doesn't use lot of water, that doesn't require sewers and one that sees waste as a resource.
There is a view that donors should not supplant the role of government; how do you see the Gates Foundation's role in supporting developing countries?
We subscribe to that theory that a foundation should not supplant government's work. So you see where the Gates Foundation invests: in health it's in vaccines, in agriculture it's in new technology. Generally we believe in making investments where the market doesn't, where the primary benefits are to people who don't have buying capacity to make it marketable.
The people who need the solutions we are proposing tend to be low income people, and there's not enough investment in new solutions for them. So we think this is an important area for the foundation to make an important contribution.
We don't think there are any silver bullets. We believe we need delivery models. So we often partner with governments to show models that work at scale. Much of our work with NGOs is around delivery models at scale, so at the end of a few years governments can take the baton and take over the process.
Part of our program, roughly half, is in line with what many donors and government departments do, like awareness-raising to ordinary people about the consequences of open defecation or when children touch waste, how many people die of diarrhea. Most people don't realize that there are so many faecal-oral diseases, that so many are dying every year from them.
So supporting awareness-raising and increasing the demand for sanitation at community level is important. And we see that people can dig their own latrines and put a cover on it in rural areas - but in cities that doesn't work any more. Yet we don't have a good solution to improve the situation.
So we want to invest in exploring "waterless hygienic toilets" - and we don't mind if it's through the Urinary Diversion (UD) toilet they are testing in Durban or through biodigesters. There are all these different approaches to turn waste into different resources to recover energy, fertilizer, water.
We think this can happen at a family scale, in a way that regenerates your waste into resources. In the shorter term this will probably involve the redesign of toilets and some waste treatment at a neighbourhood scale.
Is the foundation's "Reinventing the Toilet Challenge" part of this focus?
We have a regular process of grant challenges - that's what the foundation does to get people to come with innovative ideas. We're giving money to UKZN (the University o f KwaZulu Natal, Durban, South Africa) to develop a machine that can make fertilizer from waste. But then the University of Delft, in Holland, has come with a high-tech solution, to use microwaves, to use a plasma, that generate gas from waste. These all are examples of ways to make toilets safe, sustainable and a commercial proposition for business.
So the grantees spend a year working on their research, then after demonstrating the outcomes, what's next?
All the grantees are eligible to submit a U.S.$1 million proposal for the next round. In the next two to three years we may narrow it down to five or 10 projects that may offer massive promise to develop into a consumer product.
Will this new approach require some advocacy work on the ground with communities?
Yes, we agree that advocacy will be important. The three elements we see as key are innovation, meaning inventing new solutions - coming up with, if you like, the mobile phone of sanitation. We want to allow leapfrogging to a solution that works.
Second is to demonstrate at scale, to work with NGOs, government departments like eThekwini Water and Sanitation (municipal department of Durban, South Africa) to demonstrate a solution that will work at the scale of millions of people.
The third element is that we need buy-in from communities and governments, so we need policy and advocacy.
How would you respond to poor communities that may see reinvented toilets as second-rate and demand the kind of flush toilets used in middle and upper class areas?
While flush toilets, sewers and waste water treatment plants work pretty well for sections of the world, that's old technology. The flush toilet was patented in 1775, and when sewers were widely implemented people saw that there was no more cholera and typhoid in the cities. But even where governments invest massively in sewers, they don't always reach low income areas.
The capital cities of Africa have only a small percentage that has access to sewers and water treatment plants. So it's not going to work to try to extend this 19th century technology to the whole population.
We think we can come up with the mobile phone of sanitation - to use modern biology and chemical engineering to give people access to sanitation that is pleasant to use, affordable, and doesn't result in adding our waste to large amounts of water that we've cleaned and transported.
That's not a very smart solution, because we think we can take that waste and break it down so that latent energy should be able to be generated, rather than incurring the costs of needing energy. So our reinvented toilet would look like any modern toilet. But underneath it would be a little black box that could, as per the grant to Delft University, use microwaves to turn your waste into gas to burn and provide energy.
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Before joining the Gates Foundation you worked at Google. Do you see any role for ICTs in innovating sanitation?
I worked at Google to set up their philanthropic arm and there are examples of using mobile phones for health programs, so we would love to see people able to pay for public toilet use with their cellphones, for example. We love MPESA (mobile banking pioneered in Kenya) - it shows that Africa is on the frontier of innovation.
That's what I mean that Africa can leapfrog. In the U.S. they don't have mobile payments with cellphones; MPESA leads the way. So once we've reinvented the toilet, Africa will lead the way, so we won't continue to see the waste of using drinking water to flush waste.
What about the opposite: will we have to start drinking recycled waste water?
I definitely think there will be recycling of water - whether it goes to drinking, that's the most sensitive use. We use recycled water today for our gardens, next you can use recycled waste (as fertilizer) to grow food.
So eventually we may need to drink it. I'm Dutch - we've been drinking the waste water of the Germans and Swiss for centuries. All the water we use has been recycled.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a contributor to the Development Reporting Fund of the AllAfrica Foundation, which produces multi-media reporting on African development issues.
