USAID Announces Partnership with Toilet Board Coalition
Public-private partnerships have significant potential to accelerate progress toward the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals’ sanitation target. An exciting new Global Development Alliance between USAID and the Toilet Board Coalition promises to strengthen efforts to reach the 2.4 billion worldwide still without adequate sanitation.
Inadequate sanitation remains one of the greatest obstacles standing in the way of sustainable public health improvements and improved economic development prospects across much of the world. Despite the considerable progress made in improving and extending sanitation coverage globally during the Millennium Development Goal era, the amount of unmet need remains daunting: In 2016, one in every three of the planet’s 7.4 billion people still does not have access to a toilet.
Recognizing both the scope and urgency of the challenge, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 has ambitiously pledged to end open defecation and extend sanitation improvements globally by 2030. Now that the first full year of SDG programming has concluded, sanitation advocates are celebrating hard-earned gains and visualizing the path forward for achieving a world with sanitation access for all. One important means of ensuring the sustainability of sanitation improvements will involve job creation. This point was driven home during World Toilet Day 2016, which drew attention to the key role that improved sanitation services and facilities play in fostering healthier, more productive labor forces, and generating livelihood opportunities in construction, wastewater management, and other sanitation-related sectors.
To fuel continued global sanitation improvements and generate sustainable livelihood opportunities, USAID is proud to announce a three-year Global Development Alliance with the Toilet Board Coalition. Launched in 2014, the Toilet Board Coalition is a public-private partnership that brings together some of the world’s most dynamic companies, multilaterals, NGOs, and business minds. It serves as an accelerator to incubate and scale-up innovative technologies and services to help mitigate unmet need for improved sanitation across the developing world.
The new Global Development Alliance between USAID and Toilet Board Coalition will pool USAID’s extensive sanitation expertise and global reach with the Toilet Board Coalition’s business expertise and private sector resources to accelerate progress toward SDG 6 by using market-based approaches to identify best practices for sustainable sanitation improvements, and then implementing those interventions at scale.
“The credibility and force of USAID we think will help us to accelerate the business of sanitation, and achieve our joint goal of universal access to sanitation by 2030.”
Toilet Board Coalition Executive Director Cheryl Hicks recently spoke with Global Waters Radio to share her excitement about the new partnership and talk about the Toilet Board Coalition’s market-based approach for improving sanitation facilities and services. To listen to the full podcast, please click below.
To view or download this Global Waters Radio transcript, please click here.
By Taylor Schaefer and Russell Sticklor
For more information on the research or organizations discussed in this Global Waters Radio podcast:
To subscribe to Global Waters magazine, click here, and follow us on Twitter @USAIDWater. This article appears in Global Waters, Vol. 8, Issue 1; for past issues of the magazine, visit Global Waters’ homepage on the USAID website. For more information about the Toilet Board Coalition, click here.
