Gates Foundation steps up water efforts with grant to improve sanitation
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $4.8 million to a project to identify new methods of on-site sanitation in developing countries.
The grant to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine supports a three-year project to research and develop new concepts for sanitation such as improving pit latrines, which are the only option for about 1.7 billion people without access to sewage systems. The London School will research how advances in biotechnology, using enzymes and micro-organisms to convert plant waste to biofuel, for example, might be applied to sanitation.
The London School also received the $1 million Gates Award for Global Health this year.
The Gates Foundation’s program on water, sanitation and hygiene is only about three years old but has grown to 19 grants so far totaling about $160 million.
Unsafe water and poor sanitation and hygiene are leading causes of illness and death in the developing world. Improving them could prevent one tenth of global diseases, according to the World Health Organization. About 2.4 million people die from diarrhea and other water-related illnesses every year.
With its water-related grants, the Gates Foundation has funded low-cost, practical solutions that can be commercialized.
Among the recipients is Seattle-based PATH, which is exploring water quality through a $17 million, five-year grant to help develop low-cost filters, gadgets and other water-treatment products.
In 2008 the foundation gave $13 million to an international consortium led by the University of Bristol to develop Aquatest, a simple diagnostic tool that can give a reliable indication of whether water sampled is safe or not.
Since little research has focused on the development and use of pit latrines, the London School said it aims to build knowledge about decomposition processes and evaluate the potential of biotechnology and improved design to accelerate decomposition.
Its goal is to find solutions that can be turned into affordable, sustainable products available on the market. Researchers say such innovations can improve health and reduce costs for sanitation in an environmentally safe manner. The project will combine academic and industrial expertise and provide an innovation fund to turn promising ideas into prototypes.
Source – Aug, 24, 2009: Seattle Times
Sanitation Updates 
I am very happy to know that gates foundation has agreed for a comprehensive research on on-site sanitaion. But in my opinion the scope of reserach should be expanded to include other on-site environmental friendly options as well such as Urine diverting toilets, toilet linked biogas system , composting toilet etc. Keeping the research circled around pit latrine will not serve the purpose for the long term sustainability of onsite sanitation system.
Thanks
Prakash Kumar
Delhi
Please keep the good work going.
I hope that you will come in one way or the other to assist our work when we are through with the baseline studies.
Thank you
Francis
Thanks for the wonderful works Gates Foundation is doing. I am appealing to Gates Foundation to extend the project to Ghana precisely Volta Region Rural Communities.Life Development Foundation(LIDEFO) is NGO committed to sanitation and toilet projects.
God Bless Gates Foundation.
Silas Tsivanyo
Ho,Volta Region,Ghana
Gates thanks for what you are doing for the needy. I am in Tanzania. In a place where i stay we are experiencing inaquace in both water and sanitation. We have plenty of rains we think of facilitating its exploitation. Please assist us
Thanks J
Mr Gates has expressed a view that more should be done to turn human excreta into a resource. As both the Gates Foundation and the London School know, my view is that this research does little to achieve this goal. More should be done in examining the work undertaken by NGOs around the world in regard to this subject (such as UDDTs and Biogas) and achieve Mr Gates’ ambition. However, I am very pleased an organisation of such high regard as the Gates Foundation is taken sanitation seriously as it is the most important subject in the development world.
It is great to see such large resources going to very needed sanitation, but, as others have commented, the scope seems overly restricted. In particular, Urine-diverting Dry Toilets (UDDTs) are applicable everywhere in the world, including cities, slums, flood-prone areas, and rocky lands, where pit latrines are not feasible. Just as important, UDDTs return nutrients in an orderly way back to agricultural soils to maintain production. There are many different models of UDDTs to adapt to each set of conditions, as may be seen from the Stochholm Environment Institute’s excellent website, http://www.ecosanres.org, and a number of very simple, economical models may be seen on my Spanish-language blog, inodoroseco.blogspot.com.
I also encourage members of the Gates Foundation Staff and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to join the Ecosanres Yahoogroup, to exchange ideas with hundreds of interested experts.
It also seems that a higher proportion of resources could go toward on-the-ground applications. In the case of UDDTs, a large part of that effort should go to educational and consciousness-raising efforts concerning the importance of sanitation, the value of sanitized excrement as fertilizer, and how to properly build, use and maintain these Ecological Dry Toilets.
I agree exactly with Prakash. The focus is on higher tech than is necessary. The local microbes take care of themselves given the right conditions. My low tech design diverts urine, directly slurries concentrated waste in the latrine without water or power, foot pumps it to a distant Anaerobic Digester, yielding methane, then gravity transfers the compressed digested waste (including animal and vegetable) to a high rate composter at high temperature. How contact London Sch? Grants closed?
i want to persue my research on sanitation of one of the poor indigenious community .i am unable to carry it on due to fund scarcity.
bibek ,from Nepal
i agree to the fact that sanitation has been one of the issues especially in developing countries.When Nepal lost more than 100 lives from diarrhoea ,i came to know sanitary behaviour of poor nepali is very poor.it is really a big lesson to world community.
Bibek GAUTAM ,GOLDEN GATE COLLEGE,NEPAL
Dear sir / Madam
Bangladesh is a South Asian country with lots of problems specially the scarcity of pure dinking water and problem of appropriate sewerage system and sanitation. We are running an NGO in Bangladesh mainly working on the sanitation and supply of pure drinking water in the rural areas of Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is a poor country. A huge number of people are living in the rural areas. They are suffering extremely for the shortage of pure drinking water and proper sanitation. So people are suffering from various kind of diseases like Dyhorea, Dysentery etc.
For the sanitation activities we need huge money. But we have no enough fund for this purpose.
So we are fervently requesting you to provide some fund for this purpose and oblige thereby. We hope your kind cooperation in this regard will help to save the life lots of people in the rural areas.
We will be looking for you your kund reply as early as possible.
Thank you very much.
Your sincerely
Kazi Quaide Azam
Director
PPGS.
Dhaka, Bangladesh