Addressing India’s sanitation crisis

India has one of the worst sanitation records on Earth. Improving the situation will require wide-scale collective action, as Forum for the Future’s Louise Armstrong reports.

There is a sanitation crisis in India, with more than half of the population (roughly 600 million people) forced to open-defecate every day due to a shortage of adequate facilities and infrastructure, and a lack of understanding of the importance of healthy sanitation habits. This makes open-defecation more widely practiced in India than anywhere else, and is actually more than double the amount of the next 11 countries combined.

There is no degree of hyperbole to overstate the dire state of sanitation in India, and the impact this has on the country:

The country loses more than US$50 billion dollars per year (roughly 6% of GDP) due to sanitation-related illnesses;
One child under the age of five dies every 20 seconds from diarrhoea stemming from water-borne illnesses;
Safety of women and girls remains one of the primary concerns in settings where they are forced into the fields due to lack of access to toilets;
Generations of Indians have stunted growth from nutrient deficiency stemming from persistent diarrhoea related to inadequate sanitation. This in turn affects physical and mental development and radically impacts the opportunities the child has in life.

Despite all of this, there is cause for at least mild optimism in the sector. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat mission seeks to eradicate open defecation in India by 2019, and has committed thousands of crores in support of it. Efforts have also been made to free up tens of thousands of crores in additional funding through CSR initiatives, a majority of which will go directly towards sanitation programs. This is in addition to a wealth of existing initiatives led by businesses focusing on particular areas of the challenges, such as building up an understanding of the importance of sanitation through hand washing and food preparation.

Perhaps most encouraging, however, is the shift in focus on how the effectiveness of sanitation work and campaigns are gauged. For instance, in the case of infrastructure there has been a move to tracking actual toilet use, rather than simply by the number of toilets purportedly built.

Clearly there is a demand for improvements in sanitation, and an appreciation of the complex challenge that solving this crisis presents.

It is also clear that the ‘sanitation ecosystem’ has not yet fully realised, given the everyday reality of the 600 million people openly defecating every day. Now is the moment to realise the potential that collective action could have in revolutionising the current sanitation system in India. Collaborations often result from when there are interlocking challenges that cross organisational boundaries and responsibilities. Many organisations involved in this sanitation ecosystem – from the Indian Government to Unilever to our collaborators Quicksand - have come to the realisation that they cannot bring about this ‘systemic change’ on their own. There is a rising call for people to work together, combining their intelligence and approaches, so they are more than the sum of their parts. We’re seeing collaboration at a local level, but less so at a regional and national level. There are many organisations working in this space that may want to work together, but often don’t know where to start.

Introducing the Sanitation Scale Lab

At the end of 2014, Forum for the Future released the Scaling Up Impact Framework– a tool to help organisations bridge the gap between individual innovations and large-scale impact. A founding principle of the framework is that collaboration is a necessity if we are to scale the impact of the myriad initiatives already under way in sanitation.

A ‘scale lab’ is a dynamic platform for collective action, bringing together businesses, foundations and other multipliers and enablers around innovative solutions and sustainability challenges – in a series of working sessions and mapping to support this.

Working with Quicksand, which is involved in a number of sanitation projects with a variety of partners, we want to put the Scaling Up Framework into practise with a scale lab using the sanitation challenge in India as our topic of choice.

By addressing the issue of sanitation through a scale lab, we will build a holistic picture of the sanitation ecosystem India needs. This will help us to understand the challenges and barriers still preventing the solutions in sanitation mainstreaming in India and identify where the untapped potential for scale is. The aim is that we will create a coalition of willing partners who together can prototype and test collective actions that drive impact at a greater scale.

Get involved

We are still in the early stages of planning the Sanitation Scale Lab, but the preliminary conversations we have had have been extremely positive. If you’re interested in being involved in, or helping to fund, the Indian Sanitation Scale Lab, get in touch with Louise Armstrong. We’d love to hear from you.

This article first appeared in 2 Degrees.