Garbage was sprawled out across the muddy ground. Clean drinking water was nowhere to be found. Everywhere that Louis Boorstin ’77 turned, children clothed in dirty rags ran to and from collapsing one-room huts. Sporting a baseball cap to provide some shade from the grueling sun, Boorstin was alarmed by the abysmal conditions facing the 100 million inhabitants of Bihar, India.
His experience in Bihar was just one of many that Boorstin, Deputy Director of the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Program (WASH) at the Gates Foundation, described during his presentation in Kemper Auditorium on Tuesday.
“The conventional definition of success would be ‘How many taps and toilets have you installed?’ However, our goal, at the Gates Foundation, is redefining success in a way that includes a long-lasting impact on health, economic and social well being of the poor,” said Boorstin.
Boostin kicked off his presentation with “sanitation roulette,” an exercise he designed himself to expose the consequences of contaminated water.
Boorstin used one third of the audience to model the percentage of people who live with working toilets, another third to model the percentage of people who live with outhouses and the last third to represent the percentage of people who do not have any access to sanitation facilities.
Each third of the audience was representative of around 2.5 billion people across the world, indicating that only 2.5 billion people have access to flushable toilets. The remaining two thirds of people use outhouses or fields as bathrooms. Those using fields are in desperate need of safe sanitation facilities, according to Boorstin.
“The consequences of [bad sanitation and hygiene] are profound. Bad water sanitation and hygiene are killing a million and a half kids under the age of five every year. But simply giving away toilets doesn’t solve the problem,” continued Boorstin.
Boorstin said the solution to sanitation and hygiene problems is found in listening to the poor and adapting to their needs and motivations.
When he first introduced chlorine to villages in Africa as an effective way to prevent illness, Boorstin and his research team soon realized it was too much of a hassle for villagers to purify the water at home, as it took time and energy to correctly add the chlorine. A researcher in Western Kenya soon came up with the idea of setting up a primitive machine next to the water pumps that would treat the water with the correct amount of chlorine, according to Boorstin.
“Not only did people use it, but the usage went up overtime. It was easier to use and peer pressure was probably involved too. If a group fetches water together and one person treats his or her water then everyone will follow,” Boorstin added.
“When I visit the areas where the projects are, I try to understand what the lives of the people living there are like, but I have a limited ability to do that as an outsider and someone from a different culture. When I’m wandering around in the slums of Bangladesh or rural areas in Tanzania, I look at those kids and think what if, by the accident of birth, those were my kids? This is where my motivation comes from,” continued Boorstin.
Boorstin graduated from Andover in 1977. From there, he earned a BA in economics in Yale University and a MA and MBA degree from Stanford. At World Bank, he led a long-term environment investment that included renewable energy, clean water, energy efficiency and biodiversity. Boorstin currently runs the WASH program at the Gates Foundation, which he founded and developed in 2005.
