BY (SOPHIE) JIAYUAN WANG
(Sophie) Jiayuan Wang is a second-year International Development student at SAIS. She is interested in WASH service delivery, SME development, and digital innovations.
In 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a “Toilet Revolution,” a government campaign aimed at modernizing China’s toilets. The program has two distinct components. In urban centers, its primary objective is to boost tourism by improving public toilets. In rural regions, it aims to improve health and environment conditions by bringing improved toilets into households. The program was funded with over $140 million from the Ministry of Finance and about $3 billion from municipal finance.[i] By the end of 2017, 68,000 new public toilets had been constructed in cities and another 64,000 were planned by 2020.[ii] The share of China’s rural population covered by safely managed sanitation services has increased from 49.9% in 2015 to 56.1% in 2017.[iii]
China’s Toilet Revolution is a prime example of the paradox of innovation in public service delivery. It has shown how centralized innovation planning can achieve an unparalleled degree of digital transformation, improving every aspect of service from user access to maintenance. However, such innovation has also proven to be a distraction from the key interests of the population it is expected to serve.
Success Factors: Digital Innovations and User-centric Design
User-centric Experience
The use of digital technology to provide more accessible and user-friendly sanitation is a highlight of the urban dimension of the program. In urban centers where the program has been implemented, GIS technology has been deployed to enable users to identify the nearest public toilet through a mobile app, the National Public Toilet Cloud. Beyond proximity, the app also has several filter criteria, including toilet paper availability, baby changing unit availability, and fee status to match users with the nearest toilet that suit their individual need.
In a firm break with the image of open-plan squat latrines, the new facilities have spared no penny in putting in hardware which maximizes user comfort from self-cleaning toilets to auto-dispensers of toilet paper. Applying the ecological sanitation principle to its maximum, some public toilets in parks have even been constructed along with mini-gardens.[iv]
A common problem with sanitation programs in developing countries is the gap between supply and eventual uptake. China’s campaign has been relatively successful in translating construction to actual usage, and have been often reported to meet high demand effectively in urban densities.[v] This is largely because the program has been conceived with the objective of not just revolutionizing the hardware, but the whole consumer journey and experience around using a toilet. The integration of user-centric, digital-enabled experience design in sanitation service delivery is a key success factor for the urban component of the program.
Service design has been tailored to particular consumer segments based on demand analytics. For example, according to research showing that women on average need at least 50% more stalls than men, a larger number of female toilets have been built by the program. Considering that special-needs toilets would potentially require more space to fit in a helper, who could be of the opposite sex, the program has included unisex toilets for the disabled with additional space. Catering to the specific needs of tourists, the program also provides free Wi-Fi, ATMs, and phone charging stations in public toilets.
Digital Transformation of Sanitation Management
The digitization of government operations and the increased level of centralization in sanitation services management has made the innovations in the toilet experience possible. The program kicked off the first nationwide real-time mapped database on the location and functional status of every single public toilet in the country. This centralized management system not only benefits consumers as it fast-tracks their journey looking for a toilet, but also local providers responsible for the operation and management of each facility by generating real-time reports on air quality, humidity, and odor level.
Innovative Toilet Design for Rural Households
While tourists are the focus in the urban component, the rural program primarily aims to address the needs of home-owners in rural villages. Moreover, it seeks to hasten the transition to safely managed sanitation in rural China. In 2015, 44% of rural population were using either “basic” or “unimproved” sanitation services.[vi]
A prime challenge for rural Chinese households in the transition to improved sanitation is the lack of water and sewerage. Most basic or unimproved facilities are dry toilets, where farmers manually collect human waste to use as fertilizers. Since the fecal sludge is valuable to the farmers, rural adoption of flush toilets with centralized treatment has languished and there is insufficient availability of networked sanitation infrastructure.
To tackle this, the Toilet Revolution has been mobilizing the private sector for innovations in toilet design that meet rural needs. In August 2019, the central government initiated the first National Rural Toilet Improvement Technology Product Innovation Competition seeking designs suitable for water-scarce areas, climate-stressed alpine regions, and farmers’ desire for waste re-use.[vii] Vacuum toilets have stood out as a strong option; originally designed for airplanes, they meet the two challenges of limited space and water shortage common in rural areas, and were piloted in 2017.[viii]
Planners’ Pitfalls: Over-Centralization and High Financial Burden
Although China’s Toilet Revolution has received positive reviews overall, a few problems have exposed underlying issues with its top-down program approach.
Technology for Technology’s Sake
Given the top-down structure of the initiative, the implementors find themselves primarily accountable to the top ranks of the policymaking hierarchy rather than to the consumers. Politicians have deployed eye-catching technology components in public toilet design in order to outperform each other and further their careers. In some instances, the cost of misapplying a technology has by far outweighed its utility. Some of the most extravagant examples include furnishing public toilets with flat-screen televisions and installing facial recognition systems on toilet paper dispensers to reduce theft.[ix] Such designs, which would be highly unlikely to pass any cost-benefit analysis, are the result of the optics-driven campaign.
However, the problematic obsession with technology is not limited to Chinese politicians. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has been a development partner in China’s Toilet Revolution, has also been subject to criticism for funding high-tech toilets that are financially unsustainable.[x] In either case, this is a symptom which exposes the underlying dangers of an innovation-focused campaign. Just like there tends to be excessive investment in sanitation hardware without adequate demand and behavioral analysis, there could be an overinvestment in innovation.
Rising Costs and Falling Usage
Another dimension of discontent exists in rural China. The Toilet Revolution has zealously pushed for replacement of old facilities with improved construction. This has not been a problem for the urban program, since it is exclusively focused on public toilets serving tourists. But in many rural households, the forced demolition of existing toilets that are considered unimproved (sometimes even before construction of new private toilets) has caused distress for villagers and even worsened their access to sanitation.[xi]
The cost of the toilets has also been a source of distress. According to the residents of a northern Jiangsu village, government subsidies cover only the toilet, leaving households to finance the remaining expenditure on drainage systems and bathroom facilities.[xii] These could be as high as two-thirds of a household’s annual disposable income.[xiii] Households that do decide to undertake such spending may also end up with a toilet absurdly lavish compared to the rest of the house, while those failing to finance the installation may end up abandoning the subsidized toilet.
These problems reveal the inevitable disconnect between centralized policy making and local contexts. The blind pursuit of project KPIs and occasional careerism on the part of politicians came at the costs of the needs of the target population. The deeper issue is the incongruence between the economic disparities among rural households and the one-size-fit-all approach to sanitation standard-setting and subsidies. Under such conditions, local officials who prioritize targets over the real needs of the villagers are incentivized to demolish unimproved facilities even if they had utility, and construct new installations even if rural households cannot bear the costs.
Conclusion
China’s Toilet Revolution experience is one of a kind. Quite unusually, this is a case where the expansion in physical infrastructure is preceded and aided by the rapid advance of digital infrastructure in the country. It was also undertaken in a highly centralized political environment which enabled a high level of efficiency in policy implementation. However, China’s experience does offer lessons to developing countries at comparable stages of development. Digitalization and centralization of sanitation services management is a vital enabler for innovation and reform. At the same time, implementation needs to be better conceived. To improve the rural component of the program, governments needs to reform their subsidy structure to account not only for the toilet but also the full list of capital and maintenance expenditure items. The exact rollout needs to be planned with respect to local income level, water, and climate conditions and subject to villagers’ consent. Further, there is a need to incorporate affordability and usage data into program evaluation.
[i] “China Should Push ‘Toilet Revolution,” Xinhua Net, November 27 2017, online at: http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-11/27/c_136782254.htm.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] “China Household Sanitation Data.” Joint Monitoring Programme between the WHO and UNICEF, online at: https://washdata.org/data/household#!/table?geo0=country&geo1=CHN
[iv] Alice Yan. “China’s ‘toilet revolution’, 3 years on”. Inkstone, September 17, 2018, online at: https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/china-toilet-revolution-3-years-later/article/2164511
[v] Qi Long and Xianghong Li, “Experience the toilet revolution in Jianning, Zhuzhou”. Rednet, August 1, 2019, online at: https://hn.rednet.cn/content/2019/08/01/5781620.html
[vi] “China Household Sanitation Data, ”Joint Monitoring Programme between the WHO and UNICEF, accessed November 1st, 2019. https://washdata.org/data/household#!/table?geo0=country&geo1=CHN.
[vii] Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Planning. “Call for submissions | National Rural Toilet Product Innovation Competition,” China Luju, August 9, 2019. http://m.chinaluju.com/w/a22/18044.html
[viii] “Rural areas say hello to modern facilities,” China Daily, November 30, 2017, online at: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-11/30/content_35130293.htm
[ix] Yuhan Xu, “China’s ‘Toilet Revolution’ is flush with lavish loos.” NPR, February 3, 2018, online at: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/02/03/579283921/chinas-toilet-revolution-is-flush-with-lavish-loos.
[x] Sui-Lee Wee, “In China, Bill Gates Encourages the World to Build a Better Toilet,” New York Times, November 6, 2018, online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/business/bill-gates-reinvented-toilet.html
[xi] Changshan Li, “Who will pay for Xi Jinping’s vanity projects,” Bitter Winter, October 28 2019, online at: https://bitterwinter.org/who-will-pay-for-xi-jinpings-vanity-projects/
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Shu Han, “Annual per capita disposable income of rural and urban households in China 2017,” Statista, online at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/259451/annual-per-capita-disposable-income-of-rural-and-urban-households-in-china/
PHOTO CREDIT: Free use image from Canva Pro.