FINISH Society has recently launched the Sanitation Innovation Design Contest (SIDC), seeking innovative sanitation system designs for business creation. A total reward amount of €10,000 is being offered by WASTE organization for this contest.
Entry is open to professionals and students, with entries judged by an international interdisciplinary team.
The contest is based on the premise that among other factors, the lack of sanitation coverage in rural India (and elsewhere), is due to lack of innovation on possible ‘designs’ to fit diverse environmental and socioeconomic conditions, water needs and local availability of materials.
The objective of the Sanitation Innovation Design Contest is to create useful knowledge that will promote entrepreneurship and small business creation in sanitation activities.
FINISH stands for Financial INclusion Improves Sanitation and Health and is being supported and implemented since 2009 by an Indo-Dutch consortium comprising NGOs, academic institutions and financial institutions, insurance companies and banks from the two countries. Its aims to provide access to safe sanitation facilities for minimum 2 million users (i.e. toilets with proper treatment of waste produced) especially to low income communities in rural India through mobilizing funds from end-user households.
To realize this novel designs are needed:
- urinals
- individual toilets
- community toilets
- multipurpose toilets
In short, the novel designs for sanitation units should be backed up with cost estimations, demand assumptions so that a strong business case can be made to potential entrepreneurs (including NGOs and Microfinance institutions) to take up the construction of toilets as a social business.
More information can be found on the official website.
