David Auerbach is a co-founder of Sanergy, based in Nairobi, Kenya.
World Toilet Day – November 19th – celebrates the importance of good toilets. However, toilets alone will not solve the sanitation crisis, which affects 2.5 billion in the developing world, including 400 million people in Africa’s slums. The systems must be put in place to generate demand for toilets and for the subsequent waste to be collected and be treated.
Therein represents a tremendous opportunity for the power of mobile technology.
Kenya, widely known as East Africa’s tech hub, has been an enthusiastic adopter of financial innovations, with Safaricom’s mobile payment platform, mPesa, achieving overwhelming national uptake. This has led to other roll-outs including the developing use of cashless card payments on Nairobi’s notoriously chaotic bus system. Kenyans are not adverse to using technology to pay the bills. Could a similar initiative be applied to hygienic sanitation, one of Kenya’s greatest developmental challenges?
At Sanergy, we have begun to explore exactly this.
Tackling the sanitation crisis
Sanergy builds healthy, prosperous communities by making hygienic sanitation affordable and accessible throughout Africa’s urban informal settlements starting with Nairobi, Kenya. In Kenya’s informal settlements, 8 million people lack access. This is a big deal for both health and economic reasons: the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program estimates that the cost in lost productivity, time and healthcare to Kenya alone is $365 million.
Sanergy is tackling this through a franchised network of low-cost, high quality, hygienic and easily maintained Fresh Life Toilets. The premise is simple: Community members pay around KES 5 ($0.06) to use hygienic and accessible toilets owned and maintained by micro-entrepreneurs, our Fresh Life Operators, who purchase the facilities and then run them as small businesses by charging a similar usage fee. We safely collect and remove from the communities regularly and then convert it into organic fertilizer, which we then sell to Kenyan farmers.
Hygienic sanitation is a popular offering, with our entrepreneurs’ toilets attracting over 26,000 users per day. This usage is spread across 575 Fresh Life Toilets franchised to 274 micro-entrepreneurs. Our entrepreneurs running two toilets earn an average of $2000 per year (double Kenya’s GDP per capita of $9941) and are offered business training, operational support through weekly usage analysis customized via Salesforce, aspirational marketing for their customers, communal branding, peer networks and waste collection services.
Leveraging technology pragmatically
All in all, it’s a business-smart package for operators, but we’d like to see how we can leverage technology to help them serve their customers even better and attract new customers too. We see this as a win-win: increased sustained coverage in the communities we serve and local operators generating greater incomes.
We are now launching a pilot project with BebaPay powered by Google to trial cashless payments for Fresh Life Toilets with residents of the communities we serve able to pay Fresh Life Operators to use their toilets with pre-paid Beba cards. Whilst high transaction costs have previously stymied the implementation of high-volume low-cost usage for mobile money platforms, Google and its partners are utilizing Near Field Communication capabilities to lower these costs, thereby disrupting the market. The transaction fees are projected to be 1% per transaction, far lower than competitors in the mobile payment space.
Elsewhere, we have been able to harness the power of mobile and the depth of market penetration in Nairobi to better reach local communities. Using Infobip, a cloud-based mobile service provider, we are able to communicate directly with our Fresh Life Operators and their customers through SMS, keeping them abreast of new learning opportunities, community workshops and local sanitation developments. We are also exploring ways of conducting basic surveys through mobile and see it as a useful tool for deepening our market understanding.
Better benefits for all
With a young population eager to use new technologies, we think that users will get greater flexibility of payment and access to incentives, discounts and rewards, just like with supermarket loyalty cards, which, we hope can help to promote hygienic sanitation usage.
For our entrepreneurs, the use of contactless cards will help us garner much more accurate information and make clearer insights into who uses what toilets and when. By better understanding usage habits, we will be able to help entrepreneurs improve their services, driving more users to their toilets.
Examples of this might be in the marketing of customer specific products such as sanitary towels or offering support about which price points will secure greatest usage.
Operators will also get the chance to diversify payment methods and to easily move earnings straight into savings accounts, furthering financial inclusion and allowing them to better plan for the future and build their businesses.
Finally, this works well for us. More accurate data for toilet usage helps us go about our operations better – the better we know the communities we work with, the better we can serve them. Careful analysis can, for example, provide insights into usage times and through that we can advise certain operators that they should be opening a little earlier or closing a little later, or when they might want to offer a discount.
Watch this space as we roll out our programs – we are keen to see how technology can help us go deeper into the communities we work with and, ultimately, deliver clean sanitation to the hundreds of thousands of people.
Happy World Toilet Day to you all!