At a glance
- More than 3.5 billion people around the world live without safely managed sanitation.
- Safe sanitation is essential to a healthy and sustainable future for developing economies.
- We focus on accelerating innovation in non-sewered sanitation technologies to meet the diverse needs of communities around the world.
The latest updates on water, sanitation & hygiene
The next sanitation breakthrough: Making reinvented toilets more affordable
How do better toilets lead to better attendance?
Our strategy
We seek to advance and increase access to sustainable, inclusive sanitation through the development and commercialization of transformative toilet technologies. Our core focus is on affordable, complete, and sustainable waste treatment solutions that eliminate pathogens, are energy efficient and off-grid, and are resilient to climate and water stresses.
Together with our partners, we have made great strides in this area since we launched the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge in 2011—an initiative to spur the creation of innovative toilet technologies that safely and effectively manage human waste. Our investments have resulted in more than 25 innovations that are available for licensing, production, and commercialization.
Toilets and the future of sanitation
If half of the world still needs a toilet and the other half needs a better one, what if new innovations could solve our sanitation challenges?
An exhibition called A Better Way to Go: Toilets and the Future of Sanitation at the Gates Foundation Discovery Center in Seattle, Washington, features technologies, interactive displays, and artworks that explore sanitation solutions that can help protect the health and dignity of everyone. If you’re ever in Seattle, you can see the exhibition for free on Wednesday through Saturday, 10am to 5pm.
Why focus on water, sanitation, and hygiene?
Unsafe sanitation is a massive problem that is becoming more urgent as our global population increases and climate change, water scarcity, and urbanization intensify. About 3.5 billion people— half the world’s population—still lack access to safely managed sanitation. To be effective, sanitation must be carefully managed at all stages, from waste collection and containment to transport and treatment. If there are gaps or breaks at any stage, harmful human waste can flow into surface waters that people use for drinking and bathing and onto fields where children play and people live.
Poor sanitation, which is widely accepted as a chief contributor to waterborne diseases, causes the deaths of more than 800 children under age 5 every day. More than 1 billion people, including over 914 million children, carry parasitic worms transmitted through soil or water contaminated by human waste. Despite the indisputable connection between poor sanitation and human health risks, sanitation models and services aren’t improving quickly enough.
Creating sanitation infrastructure and public services that work for everyone and keep human waste out of the environment is difficult—and it isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. The toilets, sewers, and wastewater treatment systems that made sense in the past aren’t necessarily the best solutions for the future, especially in low-income countries. These types of systems require vast amounts of land, energy, and water and are extremely expensive to build, maintain, and operate, even by the standards of wealthy countries. They are particularly difficult to introduce as new infrastructure into dense urban settings and informal settlements, where the impact of unsafe sanitation on people is the greatest.
Solving the sanitation challenge in the developing world will require breakthrough technological innovations as well as systems that are practical, cost-effective, and replicable on a large scale. Building and proving these new models will be difficult, but the potential benefits to human health and dignity and economic growth are enormous—including increased human productivity, improved infrastructure, new jobs, and expanded entrepreneurial opportunities.
Lack of proper sanitation costs the world an estimated US$223 billion in health costs and lost productivity and wages every year. At the same time, every dollar spent on sanitation is estimated to provide at least $5 in economic return. Market research shows that the annual market value for new sanitation technologies designed for low-resource settings, such as reinvented toilets, could potentially reach more than US$6 billion globally by 2030.
