Social investment guru cleans up global toilet market

The world of sanitation could be on the verge of a social enterprise revolution spearheaded by a global social finance guru.

Arthur Wood, former global head of social financial services at social entrepreneurs network Ashoka, has left the network's London offices to help set up the World Sanitation Financing Facility (WSFF) in Geneva.

'This is an £85bn market and the first time both a top down and bottom up approach have been taken at the same time,' said Wood.

'People in sanitation, social innovation, finance, commerce and the law are all coming together to bridge the gap between grant finance and for-profit investment and really provide a way of reaching the 2.5 billion people without toilets who want to be customers not beneficiaries.'

WSFF has the support of Ashoka, UNICEF, the Water and Sanitation Program partnership, which is part of the World Bank, and UBS to name just a few organisations. The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, which exists under a mandate from the UN, is hosting the WSFF offices.

'We're using sanitation to prove the paradigm of a new type of financing with a new type of intermediary that has the right legal and financial mechanisms to make social investment possible,' said Wood.

The World Toilet Summit in Singapore in December will see a focus on social entrepreneurship with a session titled Social Entrepreneurship: A Sanitation Economy.