As is well known and well covered in the media, there is a sanitation crisis in India, with over half the population (roughly 600 million people) forced to open-defecate every day due to a lack of adequate facilities, infrastructure, and even a basic understanding of the importance of healthy sanitation habits. This makes India the world’s biggest culprit in terms of open-defecation, with more than double the amount of the next 11 countries combined.

Additionally, the country loses over US$50 billion dollars per year (roughly 6% of GDP) due to sanitation-related illnesses, one child under the age of 5 dies every 20-seconds from diarrhea stemming from water-borne illnesses, safety of women and girls remains one of the primary concerns in settings where they are forced into the (more…)

Project Samman, over the past 3 years, has been putting in immeasurable effort towards a single, immense goal: building great new community toilets. At some point in the not-too-distant future, 57 brand new, gleaming toilet blocks will come into existence, and it will be a major accomplishment for the project.

But then what?

What happens next? Just because the new toilets exist, will people use them?

This is not as easy of a question to consider as it might seem at first glance. We might think, “Why (more…)

Project Sammaan aims to rethink urban sanitation services by applying holistic, systems-based thinking and principles informed by user-centered design insights from the field. These improvements are broadly categorized into four “Pillars of Innovation”:

• Business Models

• Operations & Maintenance models

• Architecture & Infrastructure Design

• Branding & Communications

The Branding & Communications stream, led by Codesign, aims to develop and deploy a system of improved messaging, including the branding of the facilities themselves, as well as the system of visuals (signage, use of color, etc.) throughout the Project Sammaan facilities.

(more…)