Singapore’s Jack Sim wants to give status to toilets and break the taboo of talking about pee and poo. He founded the World Toilet Organization seven years ago in a bid to improve global sanitary conditions.
Jack Sim, the founder of the World Toilet Organization.
The name of the World Toilet Organization and its logo in the form of a toilet seat probably draw a lot of smiles. That’s fine with its founder, Jack Sim.
He sees humor as an effective tool to get people to dare to talk about toilets, pee and poo. Because if you’re going to do something about the sanitary situation, you have to be able to speak frankly.
“The key to the future is raising the status of having good toilets, and thus the demand for them,” Sim says. “That’s much more effective than just informing people about the clear health benefits.”
Toilets reflects social graciousness
His interest in toilets was sparked some 10 years ago when he read an article in which Singapore’s prime minister at the time, Goh Chok Tong, said the state of a country’s public toilets could be used as a measure of the country’s social graciousness.
“Because toilets here in Singapore were in a miserable state, I decided to do something about it and formed the Restroom Association of Singapore,” Sim recalls. In the course of an outreach program that involved cleaning up toilets in Sri Lanka, he discovered there were another 15 toilet organizations in the world, but no umbrella organization.
“So I founded the World Toilet Organization in order to gather and spread knowledge,” he says. “There’s an enormous need. In a world where 40 percent of the population doesn’t have access to toilets and millions of people die as a result, it’s time we start acting.
Action, not talk
Since the start of his WTO in 2001, the number of member countries has grown to 46, and about a hundred organizations and government authorities are involved. The group has established a college, and each year it holds a summit in one of the member countries to discuss issues, demonstrate technical and practical solutions, disseminate good examples and develop concrete plans of action.
“In order for there to be any action and not just a lot of talk, we hold workshops instead of lectures,” Sim says. “The working groups are composed so that they each have all the skills and authority to make decisions.”
Awareness of the importance of the sanitary situation has increased dramatically, especially in Asia, he says, and things have started to happen. One example is the Indian organization Sulabh International, which has built a number of public toilets that are now run and attended by the “lowercaste” Dalits. The result has been not just improved sanitation but also a chance to break the caste system by giving the lowest caste improved conditions and an opportunity to make money and send their
children to school.
“It never works just relying on donations,” Sim says. “So it’s a really good example of how sanitary improvements can take place based on business principles.”
- Roughly 2.6 billion people in the world have no access to toilets
- Many of them are in rural parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America
- According to the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals for sanitation, the number of people without access to toilets is to be cut in half between 1990 and 2015.
- The UN General Assembly has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation
- SCA will participate in the World Toilet Summit & Expo in Macau in November 2008
Extract from SCA's corporate magazine SHAPE 2/2008