Wish for Wash, a social impact organization is seeking to bring innovation to the world of sanitation through culturally specific design and education.
Why we love Wish for Wash:
Of the 7 billion people in the world today, everybody poops. Yet 2.5 billion people do not have access to a hygienic toilet. Instead, they routinely use holes in the ground and latrines, which often reach such poor conditions that they advance the parasite cycle rather than terminating it. Open defecation is also widely practiced, causing its own set of preventable mental and physical health issues as human dignity is stripped and environments are left susceptible to fecal contamination. Without appropriately designed waste management and hygiene systems, disease can rapidly overwhelm a community. Wish for Wash provides a solution to this issue by creating toilets for impoverished communities utilizing empathic design.
The mission:
Wish for Wash is a social impact organization that seeks to bring innovation to the world of sanitation through culturally specific design and education. The SafiChoo toilet 2.0 is the companies first line of sanitation relief products.
The founder’s story:
In 2014, Jasmine Burton’s senior design team won the Georgia Tech InVenture Prize Competition, the largest undergraduate invention competition in the United States, for their design of an inexpensive mobile toilet, SafiChoo. Before graduating from Georgia Tech’s Industrial Design Program, Burton participated in the Georgia Tech Women’s Leadership conference; the CDC’s Summer Public Health Scholars Program; Humanity in Action Fellowship in Poland; and Industrial Design studio classes that emphasized ethnography and social impact work. Burton is passionate about improving community health via redesigning water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure, which is why she founded Wish for WASH. This year Burton served as a Global Health Corps Fellow in Lusaka, Zambia and is working as a design specialist at the Society for Family Health, which specializes in Reproductive Health and Family Planning social marketing. Since working at SFH, Burton realized that much of the work that is being done is complementary to the WASH space and is very relevant to her overarching passions for women’s empowerment and social justice work.
How You can support Wish for Wash:
At this particular time, during the season of giving, Wish for WASH has launched its first Indiegogo campaign to support the toilet beta test in peri-urban communities that lack basic sanitation. You can hash #everybodypoops to spread awareness of this amazing campaign and donate here.
