4
street roots
June 8, 2012
Ja ck Sim wants everyone to
come out o f the water closet
an d face the facts about
our most basic needs
BY JAKE THOMAS
S T A F F W R IT E R
r ack Sim is the head of the WTO. Not
J
I that WTO; the World Toilet Organization,
I a global group that seeks to address an
sue that might not even be an after
thought for many, yet remains a pressing
public health concern across the world: the
lack of good clean toilets.
Much of the work of the WTO focuses on
“ecological sanitation for the bottom 40
percent of the world’s population.” And
addressing this topic in many parts of the
world involves finding creative ways to work
around entrenched social mores about what
is considered a rude topic. However, finally
tackling what should be an obvious public
health issue can yield large dividends,
according to Sim.
Although Sim, who worked for decades as
a businessman in Singapore before turning
his attention to the oft-neglected sanitation
issue, spends much of his time thinking
about toilets, he still has some concerns
that overlap with the WTO, namely the
economic development of the world’s poor.
Sim’s organization has been working on a
business model that he hopes will grow and
serve as a vehicle of economic
empowerment while also improving public
hygiene.
Sim, who was in Portland to check out
what the city is doing on the issue, has been
recognized by TIME Magazine as a “Hero of
the Environment” and the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation has also taken an interest
in his organization. He talked to Street
Roots about how toilets became his life’s
mission, how to start conversations about
what many consider an embarrassing
subject, and how he hopes his business-
oriented approach will change how people
PH O TO BY JA K E TH O M A S
think about one of the most universal of
human activities.
Jake Thom as: You seem like an unlikely
advocate for this issue, a Singaporean
businessman. How did this issue come to your
attention and why did you want to address it?
*
Jack Sim: I was doing business from the
age of 24 to 40, and each year I created an
extra business, so by 40 I had 40
businesses. But then came midlife, and I
started to review: What is life for if I’m just
going to collect and make money? Is there a
higher meaning? I started to think that I
should solve some social issue out there,
and just at that time the prime minister was
complaining about the public toilets in
Singapore. So I started the Restroom
Association to educate the shopping malls,
the schools, companies and factories that
they actually should have better toilets
because it’s very profitable. If you don’t
have good toilets, people will leave the
shopping malls, and so they leave with their
credit cards and cash and you lose a lot of
business.
In schools, they told the principal that
their children’s marks won’t be very good
when they can’t concentrate on what the
teachers are saying if they’re holding their
bladders, and school vandalism and graffiti
increase with dirty toilets, and that
motivated a lot of school principals. And
then we trained the kids to clean up their
toilets and decorate them with flowers and
animals and dinosaurs and celebrated the
achievement so that they took ownership of
the toilet.
We go to companies and tell them that
when staffers are sick, you lost money; you
lost productivity, and a company can have
very low morale when toilets are dirty, and
you might have high staff turnover, and they
understood. So by explaining this, we
incentivized a lot of people to change their
attitudes to toilets, and then we brought in
the Japanese toilet trainers to train the
toilet cleaners. A lot of people think that the
toilet cleaner’s job is the lowest and is
unskilled, but it’s actually a technician’s job
and you need to take pride in the job.
We recently started the SaniShop for the
poor because there are 2.6 billion people, or
about 40 percent of the human population,
who do not have access to proper sanitation.
We created a micro franchise to teach the
poor to start producing factories for latrines.
Each of these factories cost $1,000 to set
up, and then they produce toilets. They sell
it at $35 per family latrine, and we also
employ saleswomen in villages who will sell
the toilets for producers. They make $2 on
commission for every toilet sold and the
SaniShop producer will make $5 per
product, so the cost is $28 or $25. Everyone
makes profit; jobs are created; sustainable
delivery of public health is done; and dignity
and self-respect convenience is achieved.
When you give someone a toilet, there’s
See WEE, page 5
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