Sebastien showed off one of our toilet designs at the TEDxStanford product showcase alongside other high-impact projects like Embrace.  We got a lot of interest and feedback, and relished the opportunity to call attention to the world’s sanitation challenge.  2.6 billion people in the world live without a toilet, and 1 billion people live in slums!  That’s a lot of people who might be interested in having a toilet like this one…

Sebastien just checked in on the prototypes in the homes of our patient beta-testers.  The toilets look great, and we’re getting very useful insights on how to improve. We’re moving along carefully.  After trying our toilets ourselves, we needed to find residents in Shada who would give us honest and blunt feedback, but would bear with us if something went wrong.  We need our users to point out any design failures early and fast, but we don’t want any problem from this design phase to give household toilets a bad name.  SOIL worked with many community organizations in Shada to find ten residents who agreed to try our toilets out, and have been giving us tons of information.

We’ve always known that in a dense neighborhood like Shada, many residents live in one-room houses and might not have space for a toilet.  One of the most exciting things we’ve discovered is how some of our first users created spaces for their toilets, finding room for privacy in already-tight corridors and corners.  We know this probably won’t always be possible, but still, we’re thrilled.

We’re also getting valuable information on how quickly the containers fill up, how much cover material we’ll need to deliver and how often we’ll need to collect the drums when we scale up.

Model 1, Tucked in a corner

 Model 2.  Thirty-one inches wide of space is all you need for a snazzy toilet