Stinky Situation: Sanitation Solutions for India

Reading through the countless innovations in areas ranging from health and education to farming and energy, I remembered meeting the wonderful team from Wockhardt Foundation in India, pioneering an improvement in sanitation. Their solution, called bio-toilets, uses the psychrophilic bacteria, which is found in Antarctica, to break down human excreta into usable water and gas through an anaerobic process.

We seem to have a problem here

According to WaterAid, clean water, toilets and basic hygiene practices like hand washing with soap are critical to eradicating extreme poverty. We don’t have a chance of meeting global goals for universal access to clean water and sanitation (Goal 6 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals), without accelerated, but long-lasting change in India. This, coupled with the lack of access to toilets and sanitation facilities leads to widespread diseases. In fact, more than 140,000 children don’t live to see their fifth birthday in India, succumbing to diarrhea caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation. A report released on the occasion of World Toilet Day last November said that if all people without toilets in India stood in line, they would stretch from the Earth to the Moon!

“With more than 600 million people forced to practice open defecation in India, we are talking about more than twice the number of people as in the next 18 countries combined who do not have a safe, private place to go to the bathroom.” - Sarina Prabasi, WaterAid America Chief Executive 

The idea

It is interesting to note that the idea for Bio-toilets was triggered by mere observation. Researchers from the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) in the Antarctica noticed the penguin excreta disappearing in the sub-zero temperature. The bacteria were then derived and developed by the DRDO. It was tested by them and found to be fit for complete human waste decomposition, leading to the output of 100% neutral water and biogas.

Any takers?

The government’s movement to clean India, Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, accelerated the Indian Railways to install about 37,000 bio-toilets in coaches till now. They plan to install 140,000 bio-toilets in 55,000 coaches over the next three years. Various local governments have contemplated mobile toilets using this technology in the urban slums and rural areas where scores of families are devoid of sanitation facilities.

Cultivating a culture shift

There is more to the problem than what meets the eye. When my team at Project Reach Foundation met the local member of the legislative assembly in Mumbai, we learnt that the problem is not just the implementation, but the culture is hard to combat. He told us how people from the slums had ended up vandalizing the mobile toilets in the constituency, removing doors and roofs to take with them. Another challenge is the communities throwing other garbage into the toilets, treating them like trash cans for plastics sachets of tobacco and bottles, etc., rendering the bio-toilets useless. A widespread adoption of education and awareness campaigns is needed along with innovations such as these to move the population away from the habit of open defecation and adopt other simple yet effective hygiene practices. These will lead to better use of public facilities once installed and even encourage citizens to invest in them for their communities.

References

1. Culturing a hygiene revolution, The Hindu

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/culturing-a-hygiene-revolution/article5722991.ece

2. Pronto Bio-Toilet, Wockhardt Foundation

http://www.wockhardtfoundation.org/pro-bio-toilet.aspx

3. India’s water and sanitation crisis, Wateraid

http://www.wateraidamerica.org/news/indias-water-and-sanitation-crisis-is-one-of-most-critical-challenges-of-our-era

4. Railways sets a new target: 1.40 lakh bio-toilets to be installed by 2019, The Indian Express

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/railways-sets-a-new-target-1-40-lakh-bio-toilets-to-be-installed-by-2019-2837971/

5. The final frontier, The Economist

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21607837-fixing-dreadful-sanitation-india-requires-not-just-building-lavatories-also-changing

Raspberry Pi- Creating Innovations when you are the Target Audience

Last week, we spent a lot of time discussing design thinking and human centered design methods. Both of these methods focus on really knowing your targeted consumer audience. The design toolkits were downloaded were full of tips on how to really grasp the experience of your target audience and learn what they truly needed from a product. The toolkits were full of flow charts, diagrams, and worksheets designed to help you squeeze the essence of the problem out your target audience. These are some of the methods that define human centered design and design thinking. What if, however, you were the target audience? How will this what benefits, changes, and challenges will this bring to a design thinking approach.

This is exactly the case for the developers of the Raspberry Pi, a credit card-size computer that retailed for around $35. Eben Upton, a co-founder of the Raspberry Pi, was having a beer one Friday with his colleagues at Cambridge University. They began lamenting that the quality and skills of the computer science students who had been apply for their computer science program had been declining.

Upton and his colleagues had begun their relationship with the field they loved as hobbyists. In their youth, they had rebuilt computers and taught themselves code from books. They realized that the easily programmable computers of their youth had been replaced with PCs and gaming consoles. The students coming into their program were as bright as ever, but they lacked this experience.

Over the course of many casual talks, Upton and his colleagues developed the super-cheap, easily programmable computer. Local business people joined the mix, and the Raspberry Pi was born. The computer has become wildly popular, with over 10 million units sold.

I’m fairly certain that many design thinking and human centered design principles could be seen throughout the development of the Raspberry Pi. There were likely many use scenarios, iterations, and prototypes for the Raspberry Pi created before the product we know today was born. I imagine, though, that one key element of design thinking was lacking from the Raspberry Pi development process – the inspiration process.

I doubt that the Raspberry Pi team spent much time conducting interviews to figure out what their customer base needed. The members of their team were the customer base. They already knew what their product needed to do. The example of the Raspberry Pi shows us the power of building innovations when you are the human at the center of the design. This idea also builds a strong case for working to empower those from disadvantaged backgrounds with the tools to build the own social innovations. No one is better equipped to understand the problems plaguing a community than those who are a part of it.  

SOCCKET and the Challenges of Human-Centered Design

This week's readings explored a variety of recent innovations geared towards serving basic human needs, generally with an eye towards emerging-markets. These innovations were, by and large, very human-centered in their design, at least on the surface. I was particularly interested in Joseph Stromberg's Smithsonian piece regarding different emergent technologies seeking to bring power to people in emerging-markets in creative ways.

Stromberg highlights SOCCKET, a soccer ball cum power supply, with the idea being that thirty minutes of soccer will result in enough kinetic energy being stored to power a light for three hours. While at first this glance this product struck me as being very “human-centered” in its design, as its use-case focuses on the behaviors of people who are in dire need of off-grid power, I have to wonder whether this is a sound allocation of development funds. Soccer balls are not cheap in their own right, and a soccer ball with kinetic energy capture equipment inside of it is sure to be significantly more expensive than the average. Might we not better utilize development dollars by investing in existing technologies with broader applications?

Take, for example, New York-based MPOWERD's Luci inflatable solar lamps. The least expensive Luci retails for approximately $18, with wholesale prices of approximately $7.50 (you can purchase one for someone in need for $11.95 on their website), and holds a charge for up to 12 hours. This is surely less expensive than SOCCKET’s best case scenario (the Kickstarter campaign provided backers with a SOCCKET if they donated $89 or more).

Price aside, the Luci light and products like it offer far more utility than something like the SOCCKET. For one thing, there is the obvious point that Luci’s light lasts far, far longer than the SOCCKET. Considering that a huge portion of the world’s poor live at or near the equator, meaning they experience early sunsets year-round, it’s important to have a light that lasts as long as possible. Three hours may not cut it for a lot of people.

Luci lights also allow for anyone to charge them by simply putting them out the sun, whether we are talking about an elderly invalid or a young girl. SOCCKET requires that there be someone in the home who can and will play soccer in order to charge the device, and also requires that said individual finds the time to play soccer every day in order to charge it. This represents a substantial commitment of leisure time that not everyone may have available to them.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, SOCCKET has been something of a failure. After a very successful Kickstarter campaign, the failed to deliver the product they had promised, and instead released a very shoddy version that their backers were almost universally unhappy with. In their own words: “we totally ****** up this Kickstarter campaign.”

The SOCCKET experience should be a lesson in not promising more than you can deliver and the importance of focusing on a product's potential diffusion. While this was certainly an example of human-centered design on the surface, the reality was a bit different.

Disclaimer: I have worked with members of the MPOWERD team on previous business ventures, though I would not call them "friends".

Solutions and Enablers

The three articles I read looked at how people are developing technology to help deliver basic needs to those that are unable to get them. The first article I looked at displayed and discussed the different water purifying technologies that have been developed for people who do not have access to water. A common theme that I noticed for each technology was that they were rather simple and used resources that are readily available to people except for the clay pot purification system which requires a lining of silver to help purify water. The water purifying technologies that I found to be the most useful were the ones that not only focused on water purification but could be used for other things. The Life Sack for example can be used as a backpack to carry grains or other items when not purifying water or as an effective way to carry water that had been retrieved. The only issue I had for many of these technologies was whether or not they were cost effective or if they were readily available to people in low income countries for a low cost. This is an issue for the developer of the self-adjustable eye glasses (SAEG.

The creator of the SAEG created a pair of eye glasses that adjust automatically to a person’s eye prescription. The need for these glasses in low income countries is great as it is a way to cure myopia but they have not managed to reduce the price of these glasses so that they are affordable for people in these countries to get them. This is a great technology that many people need but yet will not be distributed for a while until they can lower the cost.

The last article that I read was in regards to the portable homes developed by Ikea. This innovation is great for the thousands of refugees that have been left homeless. The shelters are better than the tents that the UN gives out to refugees as they create more privacy for individuals, last longer, and have a built in solar panel for phone charging and a small light. Again the issue with this technology is that they are too expensive for people to buy them making the UN tents a more cost effective option.

I feel that many of these technologies will lower in cost and be able to perform at a higher level in the future once innovators are able to effectively use frugal engineering to create these technologies. Many of these technologies are simple in engineering but yet still have a high cost on them making them difficult to distribute to low income countries.