Transcriber: Capa Girl Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Hi everybody.
I'm gonna tell you a success story,
but first I need to put it in the context of long term disappointment.
Every year, 1.8 million children die from diarrhea.
That's one child dying every 15 seconds, and that's mostly
due to the lack of decent toilets, clean water and hygiene.
The thing is that we know that we can do something about this.
Through wash services, water, sanitation, hygiene promotion,
we know that we could reduce these deaths by 92%.
Yes, 92%. That means we could virtually eliminate these things.
We could virtually eliminate these deaths.
So, what's the problem? Build a toilet, piping clean water, right?
Well, it's not as easy as that.
The millennium development goals were established
because a few years back, 1990, we realized that nearly
50% of the world did not have access to a decent toilet.
The goal was that by 2015 we would reduce that disparity in half.
Well, we're not doing a very good job at that.
At this point it looks like we're going to fall short by about a billion people.
And so, again, what's the problem?
It sounds like it's such a simple task to accomplish, but yet,
it's been a miserable failure, a spectacular failure.
Some estimates suggest that nearly 70% of these types of projects fail.
And I want to say that it's not just
a health issue that we're talking about.
We're also talking about dignity,
we're talking about privacy, and we're talking about security.
Imagine, can you imagine not having a toilet?
Can you imagine not having clean water?
I mean, it's just something that we take for granted.
In Kibera, in the slum where we're working very hard on this problem,
water is 5 to 7 times more expensive than it is here in the US.
In two flushes of our toilets, we use the amount of water
that a person is lucky to have for all they day's needs.
In Solongo, which is the particular village where
this project that I'm talking about today is,
which is a part of Kibera,
42% of the people do not have access to a functional pit latrine.
Let alone an improved sanitation, an improved toilet,
which is what the millennium development goals are calling for.
And unfortunately, the death rate for the kids in the Kibera slum,
it's twice that of the rural kids of Kenya, which is also not good.
But I promised you a success story.
We're working very hard on this issue.
And we have realized that we're throwing a lot of money
at building things and that's not really working.
So now, we're focusing on the people.
We're working hard to empower Kiberans
to work within their community to become
entrepreneurs, hygiene promoters, water advocates,
and toilet facility managers.
This is a project that we're very proud to say is a ground-up approach,
it's a participatory approach and it's an approach that we believe is sustainable.
So, let me just take you back and I'm going to tell you
a little bit about one part of our program.
I wish I had time to tell you about the whole thing but we don't today.
So I'm just going to focus on one aspect of our hygiene program,
and so I can give you an example of what I mean
when I say "focus on the people."
A couple of summers ago, I took a group of DU students,
every summer I take a group of DU graduate students
with me to Kibera to work on this issue.
Couple of summers ago we went there to look at
what was going on in terms of hygiene within the community.
Our students from DU worked with students
from the University of Nairobi, and they studied
what it is that people thought about hygiene practices
like washing your hands, like purifying your water,
and they wanted to find out what are some of the reasons why,
perhaps, or what are some barriers to people being able to do those things.
And one of the things that they found was that cost was a big barrier,
not a big surprise, right?
The cost of bar soap, for example, is way too much,
hence people weren't buying bar soap,
and they weren't washing their hands, which means
they weren't being able to prevent diarrhea.
And so, well, we learned that there was a woman in another slum,
across town, who was making her own homemade liquid soap.
And so we thought, "Well, let's go check that out!"
We went over there, and she showed us what she was doing,
she gave us her recipe, brought us over to the place
where she was buying the ingredients,
and so we bought a batch of the ingredients ourselves,
and brought it back to Kibera, to see what the folks there thought about this.
I also talked to a kind of friend of mine who was a chemical engineer,
who looked at the recipe and said,
"Yeah, you know this is a pretty common liquid soap recipe,
and yes, this will work just as good as bar soap for hygiene."
So great, right? And the best part, of course, was that the ingredients were
very very inexpensive. So we thought,
"Okay, great", I mean if people will like this soap,
then this might actually be our way to reduce
that barrier in terms of cost, it costs a lot less than bar soap
and maybe this is the way to help people to be able to practice hygiene.
And so, we devised a plan.
I want to introduce you to Helen, as a part of telling my story.
Helen is a pretty typical woman in Kibera,
she is a single mom, she has two girls,
and she makes money by doing women's hair,
but it's not enough to pay her bills.
She has an abusive boyfriend who pays her rent,
and he doesn't live with her, but she would really like
to be able to afford her own rent so that she can get out from that situation.
And like most women in Kibera, she really wants to be able to do more for her children.
So, Helen came to our soap demonstration.
We brought a bunch of women in and we said,
"Let's try this, let's make this soap."
We did the demonstration, and everybody seemed to like the soap,
they thought it was really great like how foamy it was,
they liked the fact that you could do different colours,
and so it seemed to be that people were willing to at least give it a try.
We sent everybody home with a full baggy of soap,
to try it home and see what they thought about it.
Well, Helen came up to us afterwards and said to me,
"I would like to make a batch and sell this."
I said, "Sell it? What do you mean, sell it?
You think people would buy it?"
and I'm thinking in my head,
"Okay, we have to add a profit onto this cost, right?
Do you think people are actually gonna do that?"
And Helen says, "Oh yeah, I think people will pay twice what this cost."
So I'm thinking, "Okay, Helen, you are brilliant, right?
If this works, this is going to be fabulous!
We can have women selling soap, and at the same time
they're encouraging people to use soap, right?
The more people that use soap, the more people have
the opportunity to go to work because they are not sick,
because they're not getting diarrhea,
the more kids can go to school,
more kids can make it to their 5th birthday."
So, this is fantastic, right?
So we say, "Okay, sure, we'll buy you a batch and let's see how this goes."
So we gave Helen a batch, and she made it,
and she went out and sold it all right away.
Of course, Helen was right.
So, we devised a plan. We worked with the women in the community
to come up with a plan of how we could do this more broadly.
We, as a part of our program there,
we have a participatory hygiene education program,
in which we are working with the community health workers --
there are one hundred community workers in this community --
and they each are assigned to 20 households
and they work with the Ministry of Health
on a variety of kinds of health things.
And so we are already working with themto train them to be trainers.
So it's the "Train the trainer" program.
The idea is that we want to train them to be
the hygiene educators in the community,
so that we can leave and go on to another community.
So we thought, well, what if not only were they promoting hygiene,
if through those trainings, well what if they were also promoting hygiene
by selling hygiene products?
And so, we devised a plan to have the community health workers
sell the soap, to make them sell the soap.
They've been doing this since July, and they've been able
to make at least 50% profit on every batch,
and that 50% profit on one batch of soap
is the equivalent of a half-a-month's rent, in Kibera.
So, it's going pretty well, and they're pretty happy about it,
and so are we, I have to say.
And here's an example of a man, using one of our hygiene --
This is a hand washing station
and it's outside of one of our toilet facilities,
and that's one of our bottles of liquid soap.
So another thing about this was that they also figured out that
they could put the soap, hold the soap in discarded water bottles,
which we all know is a huge problem all over the globe,
in Kenya too.
And so it's nice it terms of, It helps with the discarded water bottles,
but it also allows them to have different sizes,
so they can sell soap in different sizes, different quantities,
which has also worked out really well.
You know, we can reduce these deaths by 92%,
if we have water, sanitation and hygiene services; we know that.
The problem that we have had is that
we haven't been able to make these programs sustainable.
And so, that's why we believe now that we need to not just focus on programs.
We need to invest in people. People like Helen.
We can save 1.4 million children's lives every year
if we can do this right, and that's what we're trying to do.
So here's Helen again.
We just talked to Helen this weekend, and she's still selling soap,
she has a lot more competition now with soap sales,
because we have all these community health workers also selling,
so she's actually moved over to the next village,
and she's selling soap there, and she has a regular set of customers.
She's using the money to pay for expenses for her girls to go to school,
and she's also using it for food. And she really hopes
that eventually she can move into her own place.
She's working toward that goal.
Helen is really happy about the changes that she's seeing in her community --
Oh, one thing I didn't mention is that we have found through our research
that hand washing is up, and diarrhea is down,
which is fabulous.
And Helen is really happy about the changes
that she's seeing in her community, and these are changes
that she helped bring about, I have to say.
And so, I just want to end by saying that
we need to invest in a lot more Helen’s,
so that we can have more sustainable programs,
that are really going to make a difference.
Thank you. (Applause)