Gender-based Sanitation Innovation with Jasmine Burton
Tell me a bit about the women’s lens in your work:
I launched into impact and gender by way of toilet design when I was an undergraduate studying product design at Georgia Tech. As a freshman attendee of the Georgia Tech Women’s Leadership Conference, I learned about the many ways in which the global sanitation crisis affects women’s lives and livelihoods across the world. Toilet design is a niche field, but I was interested in it because it demonstrates such a huge gender inequity and opportunity for sustained impact. Pubescent girls frequently drop out of school because they do not have access to toilets, and the negative health and economic implications of poor sanitation disproportionately hinder the livelihoods and career advancements of women around the world.
I had the opportunity to lead an all-women design and engineering team through my senior design Capstone at Georgia Tech to design toilets for the Kakuma refugee camp, which had restrictions and constraints with regard to resources, policy, and regulation. Through this catalytic experience, I had the chance to think about the ways in which we can truly include women’s voices and needs in a way that felt safe to them. Following this work and subsequent pilot of our first toilet design prototype with Sanivation, I founded Wish for Wash to take our innovative and culturally inclusive water, sanitation and hygiene-related work forward with a Human Centered Design lens.
What have you learned about women and girls over the years?
Creating solutions that don’t require trade-offs
What does it mean to create women-centered solutions? A fantastic example is the Ti Bus that was designed in Pune, India – they retrofitted municipal buses into women’s toilets to really meet women in marginalized communities where they are. It is an incredible business model whereby they have clean, aspirational and safe places for women to use the toilet in a structure that is mobile – these buses have spaces for breastfeeding, HIV testing, and menstrual health management products and services The buses act as a social space so women can still meet up with one another to build social bonds.
Solving a real problem
In sanitation and menstrual health and global health at large, there are often well-intentioned projects that might be scaling up products and services that are essentially the same products and services in different packaging – even if that’s not what the community needs. Making pads a different color only has so much of an impact when it comes to bridging the innovation and inclusion gap in menstrual health. This is often because of how innovation is driven and funded; the landscape is shifting though as bigger corporates and funding bodies are valuing truly human-centered work - whereby empathy and iteration are baked into the process in hopes of creating real solutions that will make real lasting impacts.
Design your research to truly understand women’s implicit and explicit needs
There are a lot of great organisations in sanitation that are going into the field, talking with women and saying that there isn’t really a problem to solve, or that the sanitation realities aren’t that bad. Research in this work is often laden with social desirability bias, and particularly research that isn't structured in a way to unlock implicit and explicit needs in a way that is empowering for women. As researchers, we must acknowledge the biases that are integrated into traditional research methods; personally, I enjoy the power of using behavior-centered design methods to help gamify, demystify and empower women and people in these resource-constrained communities to tell their truths in a way that feels safe from shame and stigma (or even worst repercussions depending on the context). We must design research methods to unlock women’s true realities in a way that aren’t physically and emotionally extractive.
Innovate and build in the business case
In menstrual health, it is currently considered innovative to change the colour of the pads! Danielle Keiser, founder of Madami, once called it out – menstrual products that exist on the market today only collect and absorb. 50% of the world experiences menstruation, and there is space for so much more!
Additionally, sanitation is often seen as a public cost, but there is definitely an untapped business opportunity too to providing accessible products and services via the Sanitation Economy. Sustained funding in sanitation is a huge gap. There are organisations exploring circular toilets that can turn waste into energy and smart sanitation solutions that provide information on public health implications by analysing sewage. Especially coming out of COVID19, where women-owned businesses in waste management were severely affected, it’s crucial that we get these businesses to be more resilient.
Put on your “maze” lens
Women’s lives are nonlinear – day to day, and over the course of their lives. There are certain points along the women’s physical experience for which there is more content and focus and other points where there is a huge gap in products and education, such as during menopause and endometriosis. We should put on our “maze” lens and look for the pain points to identify opportunities to innovate around how to sustainably fund it and scale solutions that meet diverse women where they are across the phases of their days and lives. Women are not a one-size fits all market when it comes to sanitation and menstruation which is demonstrated in how rapidly the FemTech space has taken off.
About Jasmine Burton
Jasmine [she/her] is a designer, impact entrepreneur, global health practitioner, and 1Y MBA candidate at Goizueta Business School who is using design thinking, business acumen, and evidence-based research to build a more inclusive world. With 7 years of experience leading Wish for WASH and 8 years of diverse global health and gender equity experiences, Jasmine is passionate about accelerating innovation in the water, sanitation, and hygiene sector because #everybodypoops and #menstruationmatters.