
Our Motivation

The idea for SHRI first emerged in the summer of 2010 when the organization’s co-founders were in Bihar, India. Anoop, Chandan, and Prabin were hoping to start a public health organization that would serve the needs of the community. Bihar has long been one of India’s poorest states with myriad public health challenges. But conversations with doctors, community health workers, and local residents centered around one large issue - the high prevalence of open defecation due to the lack of household toilets.
Residents described the shame, fear, and disgust associated with having to defecate in the open. But they also described being too poor to build a private household toilet, or not owning sufficient dwelling space for one. And in some cases, residents felt discouraged from building a household toilet because of the paltry piped sewer network in rural Bihar.
SHRI was designed to help India’s poorest and most marginalized households overcome these barriers to toilet access. SHRI’s did this by first purchasing land in communities with low household-toilet coverage. SHRI would then build, from the ground up, new shared facilities that could be used for free by the community’s residents. These facilities were equipped with biogas tanks so that the waste could be treated onsite. Finally, SHRI would staff these facilities and ensure that they were providing high-quality sanitation services every day as a way to motivate consistent use. “Owning” every stage of the process enabled us to become experts in the various aspects of facility construction and management.
Then, in 2014, India’s government launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission). As a part of this program, India’s government invested heavily in household toilets as a way to reduce the burden of open defecation. As a result, millions of individual household toilets were constructed over the last decade. However, millions of households were unable to build private toilets due to extreme poverty, space constraints, and tenuous land rights. Recognizing these barriers to private household toilet ownership, the government built over 600,000 shared sanitation facilities. However, the government has provided no guidance with regards to how these facilities should be maintained or sustained. Reports show how community sanitation facilities often become dirty, lack water for flushing and self-cleaning, are unsafe for women and girls, and experience chronic plumbing and electrical issues. Thus, the combination of these factors deters facility use, forcing more than 200 million people to revert to open defecation, putting them at risk for enteric infections like cholera, sexual assault, and adverse mental health outcomes.
2024 marks SHRI’s tenth anniversary, a time for us to celebrate our successes and update our strategic approach based on the lessons we have learned. Instead of building brand new facilities and operating them, SHRI will:
Identify-government-built community and institutional facilities that India’s most vulnerable women, children, and men rely on for their sanitation needs
Implement-its operating and monitoring system so that these facilities provide consistently high quality sanitation services
Evaluate-the impact of its system on facility cleanliness and safety
Influence-sanitation policies within India and globally so that the provision of high-quality community and institutional sanitation services are prioritized