From: senaey fethi (senaeyfethi@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Feb 27 2009 - 05:33:48 EST
wateradvocates.org
February 26, 2009 (Washington, D.C.)- Human excrement is serious business. Three African social entrepreneurs, David Kuria, Joseph Adelegan and Trevor Mulaudzi, spoke at the National Press Club last week to share this revolutionary approach to solving the global sanitation crisis. The entrepreneurs speak from experience; each has established lucrative and groundbreaking businesses related to people "doing their business." Their business models, once considered distractions in the traditional policy or charity realm, are proving to be successful ventures. Their innovations are successfully shifting social behavior and improving public health, the environment and the economy. Trevor Mulaudzi, a South African entrepreneur, stressed that "no one wants to use a dirty toilet no matter how poor they are."
Entrepreneur David Kuria is making the toilet a hot commodity in Kibera, one of the largest slums in Kenya. To increase demand for and maintenance of toilets in the slums, he founded a venture called Ecotact. "Why just do two quick things in the toilet?" Kuria asks. Ecotact builds "toilet malls" that provide bathroom facilities along with shoe shines, food, phone booths and other commercial services. Each toilet complex is equipped with 8 toilets, a water kiosk, a baby changing station and gender separate showers. 30,000 customers use Ecotact's facilities every day. Corporations now vie for advertising, while the nearby vendors strive to keep the toilets clean. And it is the business model, not charity or education alone, that drives this success.
Lately the toilet malls have been attracting unlikely champions - a popular comedian who does a stand-up sketch about toilets, the country's beauty queen, Miss Kenya, and the nation's Vice President himself, who recently stopped in to use the facilities and pose for photos. In a continent where more than six out of every ten people do not have a sanitary toilet, this new service is removing the taboo around human waste, creating jobs, improving self esteem and making communities enthusiastic about hygiene.
Kuria has recently won several international awards for his work. He is collaborating with Ashoka, Rotary, the Global Water Challenge, the Acumen Fund and other social entrepreneurs internationally to scale up his model and combine it with similar innovations. There is promise for it to extend throughout Kenya and the rest of Africa.
For Nigerian entrepreneur Dr. Joseph Adelegan, a civil engineer by training, human and animal waste was not waste but an opportunity that should not be wasted. A nearby slaughterhouse had been disposing daily the waste of 1,000 slaughtered cows directly into a local river. Joseph designed a bioreactor that digests the waste into biogas that generates electricity and is used for cooking fuel. Local women's organizations sell the fuel at affordable prices for urban poor. The solid waste left over is a cheap and effective fertilizer. His models, named "Cows to Kilowatts" and "Power to the Poor," also reduce emission of methane gas, a potent greenhouse gas. His initiative has also improved the quality of the water that the local community uses for cleaning and bathing.
Adelegan's successful business model not only tackles the technological aspects of this problem, but - even more powerfully - it has mobilized the community. It has even stirred the Nigerian government, which used to block such initiatives, into action. In 2008, his model was accepted into national policy and will be replicated within other slaughterhouses in Nigeria. Meanwhile, Dr. Adelegan, has also been featured on CNN, awarded prizes from the World Economic Forum and covered recently in Fortune magazine. He is now working with other social entrepreneurs to extend the approach to other African countries.
Trevor Mulaudzi, a South African entrepreneur, applies many of these same principles in his business, The Clean Shop. A clean toilet is good business for The Clean Shop. It offers schools and large organizations sanitation services, such as cleaning toilets and repairing plumbing in schools, teaching students hygiene lessons.�
A mining geologist by training, Mulaudzi recalled how he set out on this career path the very day he found children skipping class and defecating in the open because their school's toilet was piled with feces. Now, The Clean Shop employees three hundred people who move in and clean up unusable toilet facilities. They turn them into attractive and dignified places, sometimes with no initial payment or contract.
Mulaudzi approaches the sanitation problem from the perspective of an educator rather than a cleaning contractor. He has used such motivational techniques as requiring that each student bring his or her own roll of toilet paper as the "admission ticket" to the shiny new restroom. In doing so, he builds a sense of pride, dignity and responsibility. It usually evolves into toilet-user demand for clean toilets, which ripples up to change administrative and even government policy. Students in one location even held a protest when Mulaudzi's contract was not renewed; it prompted the administration to reverse their decision.
Trevor Mulaudzi is a finalist in the Ashoka Changemaker's recent global competition for innovative solutions to water and sanitation problems. In addition, Trevor has recently been hosted by the government of Malaysia to discuss transferring the lessons of this model.
These three leading entrepreneurs have been working with other entrepreneurs in Africa to establish a new vision of water and waste management where clean water and facilities inspire public pride which translates to political influence, and where waste management and sanitation deliver public health and environmental benefits through an economically profitable business model.
"It can't be business as usual-real impact needs a new approach that integrates together different approaches to resolving the water and sanitation crisis," concludes Joseph Adelegan.
Photos available to the press of the three entrepreneurs' work and the press conference are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wateradvocates/sets/72157614159680504/
American taste for soft toilet roll 'worse than driving Hummers'Extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply toilet roll made from virgin forest causes more damage than gas-guzzlers, fast food or McMansions, say campaigners
Suzanne Goldenberg,
US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 February 2009
The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country's love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public's insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.
"This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous," said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council.
"Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution." Making toilet paper has a significant impact because of chemicals used in pulp manufacture and cutting down forests.
A campaign by Greenpeace seeks to raise consciousness among Americans about the environmental costs of their toilet habits and counter an aggressive new push by the paper industry giants to market so-called luxury brands.
More than 98% of the toilet roll sold in America comes from virgin forests, said Hershkowitz. In Europe and Latin America, up to 40% of toilet paper comes from recycled products. Greenpeace this week launched a cut-out-and-keep ecological ranking of toilet paper products.
"We have this myth in the US that recycled is just so low quality, it's like cardboard and is impossible to use," said Lindsey Allen, the forestry campaigner of Greenpeace.
The campaigning group says it produced the guide to counter an aggressive marketing push by the big paper product makers in which celebrities talk about the comforts of luxury brands of toilet paper and tissue.
Those brands, which put quilting and pockets of air between several layers of paper, are especially damaging to the environment.
Paper manufacturers such as Kimberly-Clark have identified luxury brands such as three-ply tissues or tissues infused with hand lotion as the fastest-growing market share in a highly competitive industry. Its latest television advertisements show a woman caressing tissue infused with hand lotion.
The New York Times reported a 40% in sales of luxury brands of toilet paper in 2008. Paper companies are anxious to keep those percentages up, even as the recession bites. And Reuters reported that Kimberly-Clark spent $25m in its third quarter on advertising to persuade Americans against trusting their bottoms to cheaper brands.
But Kimberly-Clark, which touts its green credentials on its website, rejects the idea that it is pushing destructive products on an unwitting American public.
Dave Dixon, a company spokesman, said toilet paper and tissue from recycled fibre had been on the market for years. If Americans wanted to buy them, they could.
"For bath tissue Americans in particular like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides," Dixon said. "It's the quality and softness the consumers in America have come to expect."
Longer fibres in virgin wood are easier to lay out and fluff up for a softer tissue. Dixon said the company used products from sustainbly farmed forests in Canada.
Americans already consume vastly more paper than any other country — about three times more per person than the average European, and 100 times more than the average person in China.
Barely a third of the paper products sold in America are from recycled sources — most of it comes from virgin forests.
"I really do think it is overwhelmingly an American phenomenom," said Hershkowitz. "People just don't understand that softness equals ecological destruction."