Water For People market system development update

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) awarded a grant to Water For People (WFP) from 2010 to June 2015 to develop a market systems development (MSD) approach for sanitation. This update looks at how the impact from that work has continued to grow and expand, despite now having less money, and quantifies that wider impact in terms of sanitation MSD growth.

As of 2020, WFP supports 59 active MSD sanitation initiatives across nine country programmes. This update highlights six MSD programmes, which have overcome three barriers : (1)  initiating businesses or income streams that can continue without WFP support; (2) the dependency on a small number of providers; and (3) the loss of control over the growth and development process.

The six highlighted programmes are: 

1. Pit emptying and faecal sludge fuel briquette production in Kampala, Uganda
2. Pit emptying in Blantyre, Malawi
3. Latrine building in Bihar, India
4. Latrine building in rural Rwanda
5. Design innovation for affordable toilets: SaTo Pans (Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, and Peru)
6. Sanitation, microfinance, and loans in Latin America (Nicaragua, Honduras, Peru and Guatemala) to improve household sanitation

WFP sees increasing opportunities for its established MSD models to scale to additional geographic areas, while it has new models in the pipeline that are being tested and readied to scale up.