12.09.10
Julie Lasky | Projects

Acumen Sexy Sanitation Challenge



Two and one-half billion people, more than a third of the world’s population, lack access to sanitation facilities and infrastructure, making them vulnerable to diseases from dysentery to cholera. Forty-five hundred children die each day from exposure to waste-borne bacteria and parasites, and yet the subject of sanitation is locked in a cultural privy, unmentioned, unmentionable, rarely rising above a dirty joke.

Acumen Fund, an organization dedicated to reducing global poverty, finds value in bringing overlooked subjects to light. Recently, it launched The Search for the Obvious by asking for photos of inventions so familiar they’ve fallen into the groove of modern existence. Among the printing presses, smoke alarms, folding chairs and lip balms that flooded the site, Acumen selected the picture of a sewer. “Okay, now you’re ready for a real challenge,” its website invited: “Sanitation is sexy. Make it obvious.”

“We had a hunch that the creative community was becoming more and more interested in our work,” said James Wu, business development associate at Acumen, which invests in social entrepreneurship in needy regions. Among the ventures it supports is Ecotact, a provider of sanitation services to low-income communities in Kenya.

Sixty participants responded to the challenge with videos, posters, public campaigns, and literary essays thronged with frank words and images. “A child’s future should not be flushed away,” declares the animated hand-drawn lettering in “Sh*t Talks. Talk Back,” a film by the Miami Ad School students Ashleigh Graber and Kenan Reel that won the competition’s video category.





“More People Die as a Result of Poor Sanitation Than Road Accidents Each Year,” states Kofi Opoku’s Saul Bass–inspired winning poster.




“Imagine No Toilets,” by the Miami Ad School team of Pablo G. Vizcaino, Michael Malz and Sebastian Fernandez, suggests placing porcelain commodes in crowded urban areas, such as Times Square, where they can become repositories for charitable donations. (This idea triumphed among the public campaigns submitted.)



“The past 50 years has seen the London of Bleak House reemerge in the slums of Jakarta,” writes Gene Caine in a lauded essay that extols Dickens for bringing the unsanitary conditions of Victorian England to light in his novels and points out that more people in South Asia today have access to mobile phones than to toilets.


James A. Pearson summed the problem up most succinctly in his contest-winning tweet: “Insanity (ĭn-săn'ĭ-tē). n. State of the world in which 2.5 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. Please RT. #sanitation #sanity”

The winners of Acumen’s Sexy Sanitation Challenge were selected by the designer Daniel Burka; writer/producer MacKenzie Fegan (submitter of the original sewer concept); Ecotact founder David Kuria; Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From; and Design Observer’s William Drenttel.

Finalists in the video category are “Imagine No Toilets” (Pablo G. Vizcaino, Michael Malz and Sebastian Fernandez), “Sexy Sanitation” (Claire Seringhaus), “It’s Pah-tay Time” (Honeyleen Hodges, Victor Grigas, Aislinn Dewey) and “Toilets Are Forever” (Tina Santiago, Patrick Keenan).

Finalists in the poster category are Ang Wei Li and Louis Csontos.

Finalists in the campaign category are “Be a Potty Mouth” (Loren Osborne, Jasmine Norris) and “Talk About Sh*t” (Alvaro Junquera Saldaña, Abraham Auguste, Victor Serranoa Amador).

Tne finalist in the essay category is “Waste Wars” (Alexis Girard-King, Claire Seringhaus).

All of the winners and finalists are posted here.

The next Search for the Obvious challenge will be announced in mid to late Winter 2011, its subject to be determined, says Wu. Maybe it will be ambulances. Or psychoanalytical couches. Or even credit.



Posted in: Health + Safety, Social Good



Comments [3]

Very interesting. This is great though. It is a disgrace that most people in the developing world do not even have basic sanitary living environments. Anything that can bring awareness to the problem and actually cause something to change is good :).
Jonathan
12.09.10
04:35

Julie, we must always remember the communities that are “too sick,” “too disempowered,” and “too frustrated.” While the American people were sleeping the world changed. Thomas Friedman analyzes globalization in his book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.

In Part V, “Geopolitics and the Flat World,” Friedman writes about the communities that do not live in the flat world. He warns us to wake up and to extend the benefits of the global economy and democracy to solve the problems of poverty.

Thank you.
Carl W. Smith
12.10.10
12:29

The Big Necessity by rose george is wonderful and amazing read by rose george about these issues, very worthy of a read, for anyone who wants to understand the context of the issue with humour and humanity. http://www.gogerty.com/shit-book-hints-at-one-key-to-human-development.html/
nick gogerty
12.13.10
08:39


Jobs | March 29