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Message In-Home Sanitation Solutions Some 1 billion city dwellers worldwide lack adequate sanitation facilities in their homes. The reasons they don’t add a bathroom vary from too-cramped living quarters to inadequate resources. Unilever, a multinational maker of consumer products, and WSUP, a nonprofit, tri-sector partnership working to improve access to safe, affordable water and sanitation, were looking for ways to overcome these barriers. They asked IDEO to help determine the best approach to developing new products and services for the urban poor. We chose Kumasi, Ghana, a city of 2.5 million people with less than 20 percent of the population having access to in-home sanitation, as our test market. In Kumasi, many people walk, sometimes long distances, to a public toilet. Others resort to “flying toilets” (plastic bags that get thrown outside after use). Unilever, which is a household name in many corners of the world, sells health and well-being products in more than 180 countries; more than 50 percent of its business comes from emerging markets. The company was looking to develop a suitable toilet/collection service to provide a complete in-home sanitation solution. Sanitation is an area of interest because there is tremendous need and the company sees healthier, happier people as more likely to buy its other products. IDEO conducted interviews with families in Kumasi and Accra, Ghana, and researched the global state of sanitation innovation. Based on our findings, we came up with the concept for a “high touch service toilet.” We prototyped various working toilets in Kumasi households, a process that revealed people’s true in-home sanitation needs. With user feedback, we iterated our designs and ultimately arrived at a practical, functional commode. The general idea was for a service that rents portable toilets to families and charges a weekly or monthly fee to collect the waste. Unilever would train and distribute franchise opportunities to local operators to run the service and eventually manufacture and supply the toilets. Operators could lease-to-own the toilets, growing their own business over time. The project, from start to finish, took just three months. Our final deliverables consisted of a research report, the basic structure of how the service would work, branding details (logo and uniforms), and a 3-D prototype of the portable toilet and waste tank. In July 2011, Unilever plans to launch a six-month pilot test in 100 Kumasi homes to further refine the business, service, and system models. There is talk of introducing the model to cities in Bangladesh and Kenya within the next two years. IDEO publicly disclosed its insights, lessons learned, and design concepts via Twitter and a blog (www.ghanasan.com). This allowed us to broadly share the project and process with the sanitation community globally. We also launched an innovation challenge on OpenIDEO. Here, the OpenIDEO open innovation community shared 122 inspirations and 69 concepts for new sanitation solutions that could be appropriate for an urban context. http://www.ideo.com/work/in-home-sanitation-solutions