Social Entrepreneurs and Sanitation - huge potential

Great piece today on OneWorld:

Entrepreneurs Tackle Sanitation in Africa

African social entrepreneurs making money by selling toilets. Great idea. The Global Water Challenge and Ashoka rock. Think about it: 2.5 billion people don't have toilets - that's a global market of at least 500m toilets, plus nice recurring revenue streams because they all need servicing. Someone is going to a) get wealthy and b) win the Nobel Peace Prize for eliminating fatal diarrhea.

Also check out the World Toilet Organization. Sneak preview: plans are afoot to make November 19, World Toilet Day, an official United Nations Day. More soon.

Open Source Water and Sanitation

The Global Water Challenge, an initiative of the United Nations Foundation, has partnered with Ashoka, one of the most impressive idea generation factories (and social-entrepreneur-finders) on the planet. They are today launching Tapping Local Innovation: Unclogging the Water and Sanitation Crisis.

"Ashoka’s Changemakers and Global Water Challenge have partnered to open a worldwide search for ideas and projects that, when scaled-up, have the potential to transform the provision of sanitation and water. We hope you will join us. Between January 9 and March 16, 2008, we invite you to submit your proposals."

To get folks thinking they have pulled together a good initial landscaping of the sector here:

http://changemakers.net/en-us/node/1828/mosaic

[If you want several hundred pages - several hundred GOOD pages - of landscaping, go here:

http://www.irc.nl/page/35947 ]

Ashoka is very good at identifying entrepreneurs tackling major social issues - read How to Change the World if you have time - or make the time - it's that inspiring. This competition will give water and sanitation entrepreneurs an opportunity to get an open source review from their peers and others. Winners get plenty of exposure. Then it's up to the growing funding community to support their efforts. And that funding community is growing.