For Jasmine Burton, there's more to toilets than just poop: toilets save lives. Burton is the founder of Georgia-based charity Wish for WASH, an organisation that wants to tackle taboos surrounding sanitation.
"We don't recognise toilets and all they do for us," she says. “But because of a lack of sanitation, 2,000 children die every day”. Through innovative and human-centred design, Wish for WASH hopes to change this prognosis.
In 2011, whilst studying product design at Georgia Technology Institute, Burton attended a talk by Susan Davies, the director of Improve International, that changed her career path completely. Davies explained that that women and girls are disproportionately affected by a lack of sanitation and that taboos surrounding menstruation mean that many girls do not attend school whilst on their period due to a lack of toilet facilities. "When I learned of the enormity of this problem, I immediately called my parents,” says Burton, who was amongst the speakers at WIRED Next Generation 2017. “I said, 'I'm going to design toilets'."
Three years later, Burton and her peers were asked to come up with a workable design solution to mitigate some of the negative effects of this sanitation challenge. They came up with the SafiChoo toilet: an inexpensive toilet frame that could be easily picked up and taken to any destination. The toilet had a tray system to provide a safe and clean method of disposal. The design was entered into the InVenture Prize competition, the largest undergraduate design competition in the United States and won, making the Burton and her colleagues the first all-female team to win the title and $25,000 (£18,000) in funding. The team put the money towards their first pilot trip to test the toilets in northern Kenya, in a refugee camp where sanitation was particularly poor.
“We recruited some of our friends and professors to start manufacturing crude designs that we could shift to Kenya,” says Burton. Once people started using the toilet, the team realised they needed to make a lot of changes. The seat would no longer be made from ceramic but swapped for plastic, making shipping cheaper and more efficient. The in-tray was deemed too complicated and replaced with a bucket-based system for disposal. “We tested ten of these toilets for an entire summer,” she says.
In 2015, Burton led an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that raised $25,000 to support another pilot project in Zambia. After securing the funding, the improved SafiChoo was manufactured, shipped, installed and monitored. The trial received particularly positive feedback from the community in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. Now, they are hoping to scale it to the entire city.
Although still in the pilot phase, Burton is hopeful for the scalability of the SafiChoo design. Once she can secure enough funding, the plan is to conduct market-viability tests to produce enough data to prove the positive impact the toilets can have on local communities. In the meantime, the team will keep working to reduce the taboo surrounding sanitation, expanding the education arm of Wish for WASH.
"It is challenging to be operating in a space that I was not formally trained in, designers do not usually learn about working in the social sector or in traditional education programs," Burton explains. But, the fight for sanitation goes on. "Toilets are more than just about toilets, they are about people," she says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
