Key Challenges & Lessons

Challenge 1: Driving innovation within stringent cost benchmarks.

 To work within government frameworks implies that each toilet has to beat the benchmark of under USD 30,000 for a 10 seater toilet. These benchmarks are for standard public and community toilets built by government which are known to be a failure.


Challenge 2: Prototyping at scale.

Within the competing constraints of…

> rigorous evaluation methodology that necessitates a large sample size (100+ toilets) and

 > government accountability of providing basic sanitation to all its citizens …how does one prototype at scale?

Challenge 3: Sewage management a potential failure point.

Sewage management systems are a necessary part of the sanitation puzzle and potentially a big failure point from a public health perspective. From a government perspective, scale of solution is an imperative. Existing statutes and cost constraints make it extremely difficult to experiment with new, untested technologies.


Challenge 4: Balancing innovation with public accountability.

Public accountability is of paramount concern to the city government anchoring this project. The innovation mandate is therefore severely bounded and has to be located on the side of caution or “reasonable risk”.


Challenge 5: Complex multi-stakeholder engagement.

For a large infrastructure project of this nature, multiple stakeholders are a given. How do you manage innovation and design mandates with stakeholders having poor design “literacy”?


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