New York, July 22: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will invest millions of dollars for “reinventing the toilet” and improving sanitation services in poor countries.
The foundation announced it will significantly expand its sanitation program with a 42-million-dollar grant to improve safe sanitation and support innovation in the capture, storage and repurposing of waste as an energy resource.
“No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet,” said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the president of the foundation’s Global Development Program.
“But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world. What we need are new approaches,” she pointed out.
According to estimates, 2.6 billion people or about 40 per cent of the world’s population do not have access to safe sanitation and more than 1 billion people are understood to defecate in the open.
The figures raise concerns as about 2.2 million people, including 1.5 million children, die each year from diarrhea-related diseases.
The Gates Foundation has now pledged to invest more money for the reinvention of the current flush toilets system that has remained almost unchanged for hundreds of years and is unaffordable for billions of people across the globe.
Eight universities in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America have already been allocated a grant totaling USD 3 million to invent a stand-alone toilet without piped water or sewer connection, while USD 12 million is being used to develop pilot sanitation projects in sub-Saharan Africa, which may include faecal sludge management services.
A grant of USD 8 million will also be dedicated to supporting postgraduate education in water and sanitation.
The new grant will bring the amount the Gates Foundation has spent on water and sanitation over the past five years to USD 265 million, but it is expected that the figure may grow significantly over the next few years.
——Agencies