Phoenix Forum: World Toilet Organization

Kevin Teo

November 23, 2009

Jack Sim (Founder)
World Toilet Organization (WTO), Singapore

WTO: WE NEED AN END TO ‘BUREAUCRAZY’!

Sanitation must be a fundamental priority worldwide. The World Toilet Organization is a global non-profit organization committed to improving toilet and sanitation conditions worldwide. Building a powerful global network of 171 member organizations from 56 countries, WTO draws members from all regions to present a unified force and a global voice to address the sanitation crisis.

Q.1: Do you agree that a new economic order will rise from the ashes of the old—and, if so, what do you see as some of its key characteristics?

Yes, I do. The past capitalist model is too lopsided: Having 1% of the population (the rich) owning 40% of all the money and 65% of the population (the poor) owning only about 7% is unsustainable.

It is a kind of apartheid, excluding 65% of customers from the formal economy. We need to include all human beings in human development. Today, this is done through giving aid, sometimes in a somewhat condescending manner, where the poor have to be pathetic, helpless and hopeless to qualify for help.

To my mind, the humanitarian industry is populated with a heavy ‘bureaucrazy’ that eats up a major portion of the available funds. It makes one wonder why the industry is so inefficient. There is plenty of self-preservation in this industry and that may distract people from their main mission on poverty alleviation.

Members of this industry are often working in silos and not integrated with others. Sometimes, they even see organizations that share their vision as competitors. Ultimately, this mind-set is self-limiting on an industrial level. It is also destructive when politics blocks wider progress with systemic change, or Stage 5 in the model you present in The Phoenix Economy.

Donors, we often find, are only interested in funding the end results, not in the scaling up of the industry so that the end results may be achieved at lower cost and at a larger collaborative scale.

Q.2: What is needed in your market/industry to accelerate change? What barriers would you like to see removed and what partnerships would you like to develop?

Competition in the humanitarian industry is not the same as in the commercial space. Our mission is to see the quality of life of our clients improve. If this can be done easier, faster, cheaper, and better through collaborative effort, then we should collaborate to the maximum.

Volans—as well as other social entrepreneurial platforms—can serve as brokers, as the glue and connectors to facilitate building trust and communication. All stakeholders should realize that most of these issues are so large that competition-as-usual is a nonsense. Several logos are better than a single one in most projects, with a consortium approach bringing out multi-faceted skills and talents that would be impossible in silos.

I strongly encourage cross-industry collaboration, too, because fresh ideas are critical. In the sanitation sphere, we need to build entire market infrastructures by driving demand, by encouraging better design and the use of more appropriate technologies, plus much greater effort in such areas as logistics, financing, implementation, monitoring, upgrading and so on.

We see technological chauvinism, politics between those seeking funding from same donors, non-communication between fellows which can scale up together, and a major vacuum in grant writing skills which is the gap between donors and fellows. Fellows are often not able to articulate their vision in an academically accepted proposal. Simplified models are needed.

Q.3: Any other comments?

There is a huge urgency to get senior people, decision-makers and policy-makers, to switch on to the need to scale before their lives expire! Too many are micro-managers—or people with super-egos. These great men (usually women seem to be better) must plan the future and succession in their organizations not by cloning the next generation in their own image but by developing people and skills appropriate to the nature and scale of the challenges.

One key conclusion is that hierarchical organizational structures need to transform themselves into flatter network models, to decentralize decisions. Much of this is already happening at the interface between Stages 3 and 4 in your 5-stage model, as we see in a number of the other Phoenix 50 organizations.

Watching market failures, politics failures, systems failure, implementation failures and so on, we see bureaucrazy in all sorts of organizations and in governments, just at the time when their contribution is likely to become even more important. My hope is that the examples set by social entrepreneurs will help to redesign new cultures and incentives that will convert growing numbers of bureaucrats from rules-based to mission-driven leaders.

For more information: www.worldtoilet.org