WTO

©  2008  Rose George

Greetings from the final day of the annual summit of the other WTO. As usual, the place has attracted a cracking mix of people, all of whom have in common an uncommon desire to talk non-stop about toilets, latrines and the like. At WTO events, you can find yourself sitting over a plate of food while your neighbour is talking animatedly about urine spray; or on the table behind someone is discussing why excrement is sticky. Another might have invented a rather groovy sitting/squatting toilet (the sitting part lifts up to reveal the squatting plate beneath). You might also meet a prince. The Prince of Orange heads the UN Secretary General’s advisory council on sanitation, and is a nice bloke. He’s also the first royal I’ve ever met who will use plain language that I won’t repeat here relating to bodily products and which zoomed him up in my estimation.

There is much seriousness too: this morning I sat through several hours of deep discussion about the new Global Sanitation Fund, and how to get private businesses such as banks and corporations to invest in sanitation in general, and in social sanitation entrepreneurs. I wrote about one such social entrepreneur in the book: Trevor Mulaudzi, also known as Dr Shit, who is somewhat singlehandedly attempting to clean the hideous toilets of South Africa’s schools. Trevor is a wonderful character with a deep and abiding laugh who charms everyone. But for years, he had no luck trying to persuade government officials to help him or fund him, as he wasn’t a non-profit, and as the concept of small businesses trying to do social good - to be social entrepreneurs - was unknown, he got nowhere. He has since has been awarded thousands of dollars by the admirable Ashoka, and is a finalist to be a fellow of the Schwab foundation, another generous money pot. The theme of the summit has been sanitation marketing, which is the curiously new concept that sanitation can be a business. Instead of seeing 2.6 billion people without toilets as a problem, the thinking goes, let’s see them as a business opportunity. Plastics and porcelain manufacturers; soap people; all sorts of businesses can get business out of sanitation. Poor people are poor, but they do invest. They’re just more cautious because, in a lovely phrase I borrowed from someone, “their money is busy.” The trick, then, is to use the right persuasion. Ideas have abounded: I particularly liked the female mayor from somewhere in the Philippines who proposed setting up themed toilets. Presidential toilets; Star Wars toilets; Supermodel toilets. “You pay and you go in there for five minutes and you get to feel presidential,” she said, to a room of giggling toilet experts. “Why not?”

Another Ashoka fellow, David Kuria from Kenya, proposed making toilets sexy and beautiful. “That’s the way the world is heading,” he said. “So if we don’t do that, forget it.” In Kenya, he has recruited beauty queens to open public toilets, and also got ministers to come and use them. “When poor people see that ministers use the toilet too, that persuades them to use it.” His toilets are for slum-dwellers, but they are always of a high enough standard that “you and I” could use them too. In the words of another of my favourite sanitation footsoldiers, Joe Madiath of Gram Vikas in India, “technology for poor people doesn’t have to be poor technology.”

I always get a kick out of the toilet crowd. Some of them speak too fluent development jargonese for my tastes, but most of them are committed and passionate, probably because they work in such a neglected field.

The summit is hosted in the Venetian resort, Macao. It contains the largest casino in the world (10,500,000 square foot) and is the largest single hotel structure in Asia. To get to a room-ful of development and finance specialists, whose pressing concern is how to alleviate a stunning public health crisis that is killing six thousand people a day, you have to walk for nearly fifteen minutes through casino after casino after casino. Even at 8am, there are full poker tables. The shopping mall upstairs has fake blue sky and fake Venetian canals complete with singing gondoliers. Along with the WTO event, there was a Miss International beauty competition going on, which meant the coffee-shop with wifi was often filled with young women with legs as long as the halls I had to walk. As if a three day summit of the World Toilet Organization weren’t memorable enough.