Water, Sanitation & Hygiene

Users with membership cards at a community toilet for women in an urban slum in Pune, India.

our goal:

to enable universal access to sustainable sanitation services by supporting the development of radically new sanitation technologies as well as markets for new sanitation products and services.

The Challenge

In This Page

The Challenge
The Opportunity
Our Strategy
Areas of Focus

At A Glance

In the developing world, 2.5 billion people practice open defecation or lack adequate sanitation facilities; an additional 2.1 billion urban residents use facilities that do not safely dispose of human waste.

Poor sanitation contributes to 1.5 million child deaths from diarrhea each year.

Improved sanitation—including waste treatment and resource recovery—is essential to a healthy and sustainable future for cities and rural communities in the developing world.

The foundation focuses on groundbreaking innovations in sanitation technology and new ways to deliver sanitation products and services to poor people.

Our Water, Sanitation & Hygiene strategy, updated in 2012, is led by Kellie Sloan, interim director, and is part of the foundation’s Global Development Division.

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The need for better sanitation in the developing world is clear. Forty percent of the world’s population—2.5 billion people—practice open defecation or lack adequate sanitation facilities, and the consequences can be devastating for human health as well as the environment. Even in urban areas, where household and communal toilets are more prevalent, 2.1 billion people use toilets connected to septic tanks that are not safely emptied or use other systems that discharge raw sewage into open drains or surface waters.

Poor sanitation contributes to 1.5 million child deaths from diarrhea each year. Chronic diarrhea can also hinder child development by impeding the absorption of essential nutrients that are critical to the development of the mind, body, and immune system. It can also impede the absorption of life-saving vaccines.

Creating sanitation infrastructure and public services that work for everyone, including poor people, and that keep waste out of the environment is a major challenge. The toilets, sewers, and wastewater treatment systems used in the developed world require vast amounts of land, energy, and water—and they are expensive to build and maintain. Existing alternatives that are less expensive are often unappealing because of impractical designs or because they retain odors and attract insects.

The Opportunity

Any investment in better sanitation—including the construction of pit latrines—can help improve public health and quality of life. Better sanitation reduces child diarrhea and improves overall child health. For women and girls in particular, improved sanitation offers greater dignity, privacy, and personal safety.

Emptying a pit latrine in an apartment block in Nairobi, Kenya.

But solving the sanitation challenge in the developing world will require radically new innovations that are deployable on a large scale. Innovation is especially needed in urban areas, where billions of people are only capturing and storing their waste, with no sustainable way to handle it once their on-site storage—such as a septic tank or latrine pit—fills up. One promising approach is to seek solutions that have the appeal of the flush toilet connected to a sewer network, but don’t require that infrastructure so would therefore be more affordable, better for the environment, and less wasteful of resources.

Groundbreaking improvements in toilet design, pit emptying, and sludge treatment, as well as new ways to reuse waste, can help governments and their partners meet the enormous challenge of providing quality public sanitation services—particularly in densely populated urban neighborhoods.

Our Strategy

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Water, Sanitation & Hygiene program focuses on the development of tools and technologies that can lead to radical and sustainable improvements in sanitation in the developing world. Although we support some clean water and hygiene projects, sanitation is our top priority because we have identified it as a neglected area in which we can spur significant change.

A sanitation facility in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, that was built by a public-private partnership to improve urban sanitation.

Because the innovations we support can be most immediately valuable in densely populated areas, our main focus is on urban sanitation and the public policies that can support new sanitation delivery models in cities. Our priorities include identifying and testing delivery models that governments and the private sector can use to extend quality service to all residents of a city, not just those in wealthier neighborhoods. Ultimately, improved sanitation will be a key to ensuring healthy, sustainable cities in the developing world, and the approaches that prove successful can then be adapted and extended to rural communities.

Our strategy to build global demand for better sanitation also includes efforts to end open defecation in rural areas and to implement improved measures for collecting waste, removing pathogens from waste streams, and recovering valuable resources and energy.

Most of our sanitation projects are in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where the burden of inadequate sanitation is greatest.

Areas of Focus

We focus our grantmaking in five complementary areas: transformative technologies, urban sanitation markets, building demand for sanitation, policy and advocacy, and monitoring and evaluation.

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Transformative Technologies
Urban Sanitation Markets
Building Demand for Sanitation
Policy and Advocacy
Monitoring and Evaluation

Transformative Technologies

We are working to help develop and deploy innovative and affordable technologies that can radically improve sanitation in the developing world, particularly in densely populated urban areas. A key part of this effort is our Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, which is funding research to develop waterless, hygienic toilets that do not require a sewer connection or electricity and cost less than five cents per user per day. Most of these projects use chemical engineering processes for energy and resource recovery from human waste.

A prototype toilet designed by Loughborough University researchers that extracts biological charcoal, minerals, and clean water from human waste.

In August 2012, three prototypes from the first round of grants were selected as winners of the challenge. California Institute of Technology in the United States received first place for a solar-powered toilet that generates electricity. Loughborough University in the United Kingdom won second place for a toilet that extracts biological charcoal, minerals, and clean water from human waste. University of Toronto in Canada won third place for a toilet that sanitizes feces and urine and recovers resources and clean water. We are continuing to fund additional grants through the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge.

At the same time, we are developing market-driven ways to stop the dumping of fecal sludge into the environment. The Omni-Ingestor program is developing technologies to make servicing and maintenance of existing sanitation infrastructure—including latrine pits, cesspools, and septic tanks—easier and more affordable for private companies, public utilities, and municipalities. The Omni-Processor program is developing cost-effective approaches for processing fecal sludge and the combined processing of fecal sludge and urban organic waste. The goal is to develop a processor that supports 1,000 to 5,000 urban residents. Ideally, processed waste will be converted into products that can generate revenue and thereby offset waste collection costs, encourage technology acceptance and use, and increase urban standards of living.

Urban Sanitation Markets

New sanitation technologies require new market structures and service models. In key urban markets, we are testing innovations for their appeal to people in real-world settings.

These toilets in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, are distributed through local entrepreneurs, who collect the waste for use in generating electricity and producing fertilizer.

We are also working with local governments, service providers, and community-based organizations to foster a policy and regulatory environment that supports the use of new sanitation products and delivery methods.

We see particular promise in innovations that generate revenue for private-sector providers who can profit from byproducts that have market value, such as energy and fertilizer generated from fecal sludge. We also recognize that in the near term, such revenues will not fully cover treatment costs or generate traditional rates of return, and that the public sector will always have a role to play—not only to provide regulation and oversight but also to supply some of the services.

Building Demand for Sanitation

A household toilet built as part of a community sanitation project in Badsu village in Himachal Pradesh, northern India.

In addition to investing in improved technologies and urban market conditions, we support initiatives that help stimulate demand for improved sanitation, with a focus on the rural poor. Part of this effort involves working with sanitation providers and partners to help them adopt more evidence-based practices so they can deliver sanitation services that meet people’s needs. It also includes promoting incremental shifts in social norms around toilet use that will lead to higher demand for better sanitation products and services as they become available.

Policy and Advocacy

Our policy and advocacy work is designed to encourage and support sanitation policies that work for poor people. Part of our strategy involves efforts to improve the policy and regulatory environment for sanitation through partnerships with governments, multilateral organizations, NGOs, and other advocates.

Monitoring and Evaluation

We invest in monitoring and evaluation to understand the effectiveness of various sanitation approaches. We use this information to report on our progress, assess the impact of our grantmaking, and share lessons that we learn with our partners.

Bill & Melinda Gates foundation

General Information

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What We Do

Strategy Overview