Update: October 6, 2008
Jack Sim, one of the lead social entrepreneurs implementing the plan described below, has just been selected as a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment for 2008. Congratulations Jack!


I'm in a meeting right now in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where a small group of social entrepreneurs is conspiring to revolutionize the world: they plan to combine new software design and new toilet designs to bring clean sanitation to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

As targeted by the Millenium Development Goals, over two billion people suffer disease, water pollution, and economic woes because of inadequate sanitation. And promising solutions in some cultures and economies are inhibited from scaling larger because producing appropriate toilets takes time. Especially if we're talking millions and millions of locally appropriate toilets!

But this group of entrepreneurs gathered in Thailand this week, sponsored by Ashoka, has a new idea: Start producing the toilet components centrally at a huge scale rather than in scattered places around the world. Then use the web to give local groups in any country access to this single global source, through a single portal or marketplace. The massive global demand channeled through a single web marketplace will justify entrepreneurial investment in the huge volume, high quality, low cost supply side to begin with.

Mr. Jack Sim of Singapore, founder of the World Toilet Organization, and Mr. Hamzah Harun Al'Rasyid of Indonesia, will carry on these discussions during World Water Week August 17-23 in Stockholm, and Ashoka will help develop the idea further. It is an exciting prospect for the health of hundreds of millions of people around the planet, and an exciting example the powerful role the web can play in changing approaches to global problem solving.