There’s a saying in English: “Necessity is the mother of invention” – but this has always struck me as incomplete. Necessity is also the mother of innovation, i.e. a novelty that generates a profit or something of value for a community, as in a social innovation. What follows is the story of our drive for community engagement and nudge therapy, amid the coronavirus pandemic. Around early March 2020, I started getting the same questions from my international students in Maastricht and my NGO team...
Chances are – if you are reading this brief post – that you have never really had to worry about a full bladder (or worse). Of course, you would have needed to find a toilet at some point, possibly urgently, but there would have been at least one or two options. About 900 million people worldwide have no such choice; either at home or in their local environment. Another 1.4 billion people use toilets that do not meet basic standards. In short, we are facing a global sanitation crisis. UNICEF est...
Young entrepreneurs from ‘Finish Society India’ and ‘Sidian Bank Kenya’ were honoured in this year’s ‘Sarphati Sanitation Awards’, presented at the opening ceremony of Amsterdam International Water Week on 30 October 2017. Shortlisted for the Award were (i) Mr Abhijit Banerji of Finish Society India, (ii) Ms Catherine Kisamwa of Sidian Bank Kenya and (iii) Andrew Foote of Sanivation Kenya. Mr Abhijit Banerji won the category prize of €25,000. Sidian Bank Kenya is a close partner in the FINISH IN...
Today is Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, and in homage to his philosophy and strategy of non-violence, the UN has marked it as the International Day of Non-Violence. In India, the countdown has also begun for 2 October 2019, the target date set to attain the Swachh Bharat or Clean India Mission (SBM). The SBM has the noble intention of making India ‘open defecation free’ (ODF) and millions of low-cost toilets are being built across the country towards this aim. But, to achieve the ODF mis...
A joint post by Rushva Parihar and Dorcas Mbuvi. … An estimated 2.4 billion people still do not have access to proper sanitation, of which about 1 billion still defecate in the open. These figures represent the enormous challenge of achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 and its specific target to “achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation” by 2030. Critically, reaching unserved populations at scale will require low-cost sanit...
Trust in experts has plummeted in recent years, in our ‘post-truth‘ era. Yet humanity’s most complex problems — from violent extremism to food security to climate change — will never be solved by late-night tweets or political isolationism. What seems to be the key are partnerships: particularly between researchers and media professionals. All of which begs the question: how can experts reach the masses? How can they inform the public debate? And why is this importa...
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are among the world’s most neglected groups and issues related to their health care are barely addressed in the Sustainable Development Goals. However, the recent International Conference on Population Development under the theme ‘ICPD beyond 2014’ declared an urgent need to protect the rights of IDPs....
“India is one of the fastest growing countries in Asia, backed by strong knowledge intensive sectors – pharmaceuticals, chemical automotive, telecommunications, and aerospace to name but a few,” says DEIP Programme Coordinator Dr. Michiko Iizuka. “India is also exploring new models of development that are applicable to other countries, including frugal innovation and service sector led development. But for India to achieve anywhere near its full potential, all the major actors of her National Sy...
“Worldwide about a billion people defecate in the open — including 600,000 in India. So when Sikkim in the far northeast of India was declared ‘Open Defecation Free’ in 2016, we were curious. How did this small state, capped by Himalayan peaks and dotted with Buddhist monasteries, manage it? How did Sikkim turn the tide?” asks PhD fellow Rushva Parihar. His supervisor, Prof. Shyama V. Ramani, is an expert on (the evolution of) development economics. In her usual transpare...
Shyama V. Ramani, Professor of Development Economics at UNU-MERIT, has been working on the issue of sanitation since the tsunami of December 2004. It all started as a charity project to build toilets for women in a small coastal village in Tamil Nadu, her home state in the southernmost part of India. “The tsunami had destroyed the vegetal cover around the village and the women could no longer relieve themselves in the bushes as they used to. They needed toilets.” But the project failed, and so S...