In Kenya’s slums, 8 million people lack access to adequate sanitation.  Inadequate sanitation is a breeding ground for disease and the cause of pre-mature death for many, but for Ani Villabhaneni and David Auerbach, two business school classmates, improper sanitation also bred an innovative business model.

A Sanergy Fresh Life toilet in Nairobi.

Co-founders Ani Villabhaneni and David Auerbach became aware of the urgent need for reliable sanitation solutions in a “Development Ventures” class at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a class that, “challenge[s] students to craft enduring and economically viable solutions to problems faced by at least one billion people worldwide.”[1]

Worldwide, some 2.6 billion people in the world lack access to adequate sanitation.[2] For many, that means using pit toilets, or defecating in the open, often near food and water sources.  The disease and water pollution caused by inadequate sanitation causes 1.7 million deaths and the loss of $84 billion in worker productivity each year.  Auerbach and Villabhaneni turned their focus to the slums of Nairobi, Kenya.

A Sanergy Fresh Life toilet at a maternity clinic in Nairobi.

“We knew there was already a paid market for sanitation; that wasn’t something we had to develop.  There were already eco toilets set up in parts of Nairobi.  Bringing eco-toilets to the slums – that was our challenge,” said Villabhaneni.

The Sanergy model centers on the low-cost eco-friendly toilets called Fresh Life that the Sanergy team designed with their community’s needs in mind. The toilets are distributed through franchising to local entrepreneurs who take ownership of the toilets and charge 5 choo (around $.05). The resulting waste is collected by trained Sanergy Fresh Life Operators and fed to an anaerobic digester to produce biogas.  The biogas is processed into organic fertilizer for local farms. At each step, this model creates jobs and improves livelihoods while simultaneously addressing the serious sanitation needs in the community.

Collecting waste from a Sanergy toilet in Nairobi that will be turned into fertilizer for local farmers.

Thirty-four toilets have been established so far in Mukuru, a slum of 250,000 people in east Nairobi.  Each toilet has about 60 users per day, the number that the Sanergy team focuses on to gauge their progress, instead of tracking the number of toilets that might remain unused. From these toilets, Sanergy has created 35 tonnes of fertilizer.

Currently, Sanergy employs 42 full-time staff and 10 part time staff, about half of whom come from the local community.  “All the jobs we are creating are all in the formal sector.  Pension and health coverage; it’s important to be able to provide these social safety nets,” said Villabhaneni.

By the end of this year, Sanergy aims to have established between 80-100 toilets and will be expanding to other parts of Kenya.

On World Toilet Day 2011, Nairobi Town Clerk Phillip Kisia cuts the ribbon to open the newest Fresh Life toilet, while its owner, Caroline Mueni Mutua joyfully looks on.

Sanergy has proven that for-profit and ecologically-friendly sanitation is a viable business and realistic model for developing countries.  In the words of one of Sanergy’s Fresh Life Operators, Victor Omondi, when asked how his work makes him feel about himself, “I feel good. I know that when I leave my house, I will earn my daily bread. I see the message on Sanergy’s shirts – Be You, Be Clean, Be Fresh – and I know that I am there.”[3]

Hopefully, more young entrepreneurs will take on similar challenges now that the precedent is set for turning the unglamorous into something that promotes living standards through environmental and economic sustainability.

You can learn more about Sanergy and follow their blog at http://saner.gy/ and through this video at http://vimeo.com/16095397.

About the Author

Hilary Fischer-Groban is a freelance writer based in Mumbai, with a background in corporate social responsibility.  She has been studying India since she first visited in 2004. Originally from Boston, she previously worked at ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth and the Harvard Business Review Press.  Hilary graduated from Brown University with a degree in South Asian Studies and made the move to Mumbai in 2010.  She enjoys exploring opportunities to apply top of the pyramid, process-driven efficacy to bottom of the pyramid issues.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group. 

“This [water] crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns.” – United Nations Human Development Report, 2006

A necessity for human life, water is also the world’s most common transmitter of disease. Prevalent, and usually preventable, water-borne diseases result in a staggering 3.5 million deaths per year, and has devastating economic affects through lost productivity and medical expenses.^[1],[2]

These effects are often most severely felt in slums, where immense over-crowding, severely compromised sanitation systems and a lack of legal regulations surrounding line access means that inexpensive, clean water is almost non-existent. The number of slum dwellers – now at around 1 billion – is expected to double by 2030. Around the world, not only do slum dwellers typically pay more for their water than high-income residents of the same city, they even pay more than people in developed countries.^[3]

Given a lack of infrastructural backing, point-of-use (POU) technologies, in which water is purified immediately before use, could be an inexpensive but invaluable method of individual decontamination. However, up until now, POU products have been slow to enter to slum markets because many companies fear high entry costs, as well as social and political stigmas.

One organization, WaterWalla, is helping to bridge this gap between the technology, education, and profitability of clean water in the Dharavi slum of Mumbai.  Founded in August 2010 by a group of five American college students from the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University, WaterWalla establishes micro-businesses that sell and distribute POU technologies from reliable companies such as Bajaj, Eureka Forbes, and TATA, through entrepreneurs in independently-owned franchises. The local franchise-based model means that water purification can become a sustainable livelihood for entrepreneurs as well as improve standards of living.

Neil Parikh, who co-founded WaterWalla as a junior at Brown University, and now serves as an advisor, said that, “As a pre-medical student, I wanted to apply what I was learning in class to a meaningful, tangible problem.  As I talked with my classmates and friends, we decided that water was the most important pillar of the pyramid and one that we could impact with scale as students.” After he graduated, Anshu Vaish (Brown ’11.5) & Soaib Grewal (RISH ’11) took over to lead the US & India teams respectively.

Neil continued, “The initial research we did into the condition of slum water sanitation in Dharavi was shocking.  33% of families had significant E. coli contamination. We wanted to design a solution through which these residents not only got the best technology, but also became empowered to advocate to their communities about the benefits of clean water.”

WaterWalla equips interested local entrepreneurs to run their own WaterWalla shops, giving them a renovated storefront, marketing assistance, and access to technology. By July 2012, WaterWalla will have an expected 10 shops throughout Dharavi.

Building the market for these shops through increased awareness is an integral component of WaterWalla. WaterWalla trains local women’s groups and networks as a vehicle for not just education, but also marketing, and door-to-door sales. Beyond solely describing its health benefits, WaterWalla also raises awareness about the effects of clean water on slum dwellers’ personal finances and other, more tangible benefits, like decreases in medical expenses, increases in productivity, and higher school attendance rates.

WaterWalla not only harnesses the unique entrepreneurial spirit of Dharavi to improve its quality of life; it also empowers the community to make this change for themselves. WaterWalla’s first shop-owner, JT, used to run an ayurvedic medicine business, but from the beginning, says Parikh, “It was clear that WaterWalla for him wasn’t about the money, it was about finding ways to fill a need in his own community. And that’s what we’re hoping to find in every community we work in.”

For more information, please visit http://www.waterwalla.org.