Inside Bill’s Brain, A Review by Toini Nambahu

The documentary, “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates,” kicks off with his childhood memories, and also delves into his time founding Microsoft, and mostly notably, his foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Children in the developing world are dying from a preventable disease like diarrhea. 12% of these deaths are children under the age of five. This probed Bill to devote his time and resources to improve sanitation in the developing world.

Episode 1 of the documentary starts off with the global sanitation problem. Bill is on a mission to reinvent the toilet. To help curb the sanitation problem, he enlisted the help of other great minds such as engineers to work on new affordable solutions that will improve toilet and sewer system infrastructure. He wrote to some of the world’s most prestigious universities asking them to think about fixing the world`s toilet problem, so that they could begin saving lives together. Most did not bother to respond!

Bill had to find a new way to get the universities to participate. His wife, Melinda Gates, and co-partner of the Bill & Melinda Foundation, helped shape the idea of a “reinvented toilet” by probing Bill to think about the end users. Melinda stressed the importance of considering the mothers who want to make sure their children have access to a safe and hygienic toilet. Because of Foundation’s efforts, a lot of funding has been dedicated to research work on a “reinvented toilet” that does not use water and can produce electricity out of human waste.

The white board idea finally became a reality during a Toilet Fair, where different universities showcased their toilet prototypes. Some of the showcased toilet prototypes were squat toilets that dried and burned the waste to create heat that can disinfect urine. As well as a startup that showcased a toilet powered by solar panels that used an oxygen compost process to make fertilizer and water for flushing from the byproducts.

Bill and his team are not alone trying to solve this massive problem. I’m part of a small startup in Namibia called Worldview Technology that is also working on simple but innovative solutions to the sanitation problem. We may not have the same resources that Bill & Melinda Foundation have but have come up with equally as good solutions that people in areas without sewage systems are using. I’ll share a link at the end of this article. We have now found ourselves building a web app to help the more than a million Namibians to order adequate sanitation solutions by the push of a button!

As I prepare to go back to the field and talk to more users, I wonder how the toilet in 2070 will be? Will it be the same technology we have been using for over 200 years? Or will the next 100 years be similar to a race to the moon for toilets where amazing innovations will occur?

One thing is for sure, the world needs more visionary people who are willing to take a stand on the sanitation problem and come up with renewed solutions that will save and improve lives, especially in developing countries which are more prone to diseases due to little or lack of proper toilets.

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