Bill Gates Can't Build A Toilet

Bill Gates Is Getting The Toilet Wrong
Bill Gates speaks at the "Reinventing the Toilet" Fair, Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2012, in Seattle. The event is part of a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation competition to reinvent the toilet for the 2.6 billion people around the world who don't have access to modern sanitation. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Bill Gates speaks at the "Reinventing the Toilet" Fair, Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2012, in Seattle. The event is part of a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation competition to reinvent the toilet for the 2.6 billion people around the world who don't have access to modern sanitation. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

In addition to eradicating polio in India and starting the personal computer revolution, the Seattle Superman of our age has managed to make going to the bathroom a cause célèbre. Five years ago, if I’d told people I worked on toilets, they would have surely assumed I was a plumber. Now, they exclaim: “Oh! Isn’t Bill Gates into that?”

More than one-third of the world’s population, approximately 2.5 billion people, doesn’t have access to a toilet. The Gates Foundation and a handful of celebrities like Matt Damon deserve credit for putting this sanitation crisis on the map.

The trouble is that the Gates Foundation has treated the quest to find the proper solution as it would a cutting-edge project at Microsoft: lots of bells and whistles, sky-high budgets and engineers in elite institutions experimenting with the newest technologies, thousands of miles away from their clients.

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