A note about toilets (and social entrepreneurship)

We have several Ashoka Fellows who focus on toilets as a way of bringing social change. Today we want to congratulate the two Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows Jack Sim and David Kuria who won the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepeneur of the Year 2009 for Asia and Africa respectively.

They both work on improving sanitation by changing the way communities see toilets.

David's organization, IKO Toilets, has achieved this by transforming run-down toilet stations in Kenya into mini shopping malls where customers can even get their shoes shined. David offers customers the ability to pay for using these toilets through mobile phone technology.

While Jack, through World Toilet Organization (WTO), is revamping the field of sanitation worldwide by bringing technical, financial, organizational, and market-related strategies to citizen organizations working on sanitation (for all of you inventors out there: while you are visiting his website make sure to check out WTO's timeline of toilet inventors).

Additionally, another Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow working in the toilet business, Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, was awarded the 2009 Stockholm Water Prize: "Since he established the Sulabh Sanitation Movement in 1970, Dr. Pathak has worked to change social attitudes toward traditional unsanitary latrine practices in slums, rural villages, and dense urban districts, and developed cost effective toilet systems that have improved daily life and health for millions of people. He has also waged an ongoing campaign to abolish the traditional practice of manual “scavenging” of human waste from bucket latrines in India while championing the rights of former scavengers and their families to economic opportunity, decent standards of living, and social dignity."

Pictures: before and after pictures of David Kuria's IKO Toilet initiative. After pictures with Miss Kenya. Special thanks to flickr/John Sauer for letting us use the pictures.