Reinvent the Toilet Challenge

A global sanitation research and innovation initiative launched in 2011 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to spur the creation of new toilet technologies capable of safely and effectively managing human waste without connection to a sewer network or outside energy source. The challenge specifically targets affordable, sustainable, off-grid sanitation solutions suited to the developing regions where conventional sewered systems remain impractical or prohibitively expensive to build, and it funds university and institutional research teams, among them Columbia University, Clarkson University and the International Water Association, to design and test candidate technologies. By the foundation's own account the challenge has produced more than 25 distinct innovations that are now available for licensing, production or commercialization, engineered to destroy disease-causing pathogens in waste, to operate without a reliable power grid, and to withstand the climate and water stresses common in the communities where they are meant to be deployed, in service of the foundation's stated goal of extending access to safely managed sanitation to the roughly 3.5 billion people who still lack it.