# 119: SPECIAL — Everybody’s Business? New Toilets, Old Humanities
On the Differences between Academic Activism and Social Entrepreneurship
Story behind the Passage
Today, someone made me aware of an upcoming conference in my field. It is going to be held on/around World Toilet Day. It is up to you to come up with your own assessment what this says about the state of the humanities. I simply love the example because it gives me the opportunity to explain something in detail with a practical example that seems to be moving the minds of highly sophisticated thinkers in the humanities. At least, this is something that I am learning from the conference announcement. There seem to be so many things wrong with toilets that humanities scholars feel they have to take care of the problem. Otherwise, they would not be spending half a page and three full conference days on this issue, right?
This preoccupation with “problems” is really great because it immediately takes us to the difference between activism and entrepreneurship. As the reader learns from the announcement — and this is a very fascinating thing for me to learn which I thank the organizers for — there is a World Toilet Day! What is not stated in the blurb is that the World Toilet Day was invented by a man named Jack Sim from Singapore. Sim made a fortune in construction work and after selling his company in his 40s, he looked for a way to spend his money and time wisely for the benefit of humanity. While looking for the best options, i.e., the worst problems, he came across the fact that millions of people around the world suffer from sanitation problems. This was an issue big enough for his visionary thinking. So, he founded the non-profit World Toilet Organization and the social enterprise SaniShop.
Wait a second!
Did you just read the words “company” and social “entrepreneurship”?
Brrrr. Business!
Let us zoom in to see what this is about.
My Learnings
The reason why I am going slowly and step by step here is because I often get told that people in the humanities do not know much about entrepreneurship. Or they think they know something about it but then end up completely puzzled when they encounter it in real life but it does not suit their pre-fabricated stereotypes of bad capitalism and bad everything. In fact, I am not sure how they are planning to hold the conference and where exactly, in case the virus is mostly under control by November. Since they seem to have such dramatic views of toilets, I do not want to be in their skin when trying to find the right location with the proper sanitary equipment. Not even talking about finding the properly designed loos that fit their special needs and spare them more traumatic experiences. But I am sure, they know what they are doing…
So, before explaining more about the difference between activism and entrepreneurship, let me just clarify one thing that is very important to me. I have traveled and partly lived in countries where a large part of the population did not have toilets and running water, including myself wherever I spent the night. And I also know what this means with respect to health and other related problems in extremely poor countries. The reason why I am emphasizing this is because it is important to me to highlight that I am taking the actual problem behind the World Toilet Day seriously. I mean, the problem of the people who suffer from this. I am not sure what these people would say if someone built an academic career around their existential needs. But I am quite certian they have other problems to worry about than academic newsletters.
Problems actually take us to the core of the matter. How do academics approach problems and how do entrepreneurs approach them? I do not have to tell you anything theoretical here because it is all included in this toilet example. So, the first part is about Sim. Sim, as you learned, is an entrepreneur who fixed people’s housing problems by helping construct buildings for them. He did so after working his way up from a poor family background. He was a bad student but finally managed to get a degree in management. As with many students who do not like reading text books, he was very skilled in communication and sales. After many ups and downs, he owned several properties and sold his main company for many millions. You can read more about the keen and skilled business man online (“From O-Level Failure”).
As you will read in his life story and many other entrepreneurial biographies, his success depended on his ability to detect a problem and solve it with a service or a product that his clients and/or investors were willing to pay for. Otherwise, he would have gone bankrupt. This is what entrepreneurial problem solving is all about as you can read in the following definition:
“Entrepreneurial problem solving is the process of using innovation and creative solutions to close that gap by resolving societal, business, or technological problems. Sometimes, personal problems can lead to entrepreneurial opportunities if validated in the market.” (Geoffrey Graybeal)
With this mindset, he also started his philanthropical career. He wanted to use his money to create impact in the world. So, he chose a big problem. Then comes the interesting part: He founded the World Toilet Organization (WTO — not to be confused with the World Trade Organization) that serves as an umbrella association for promoting his vision — sanitation, healthcare, etc. This is the first part of the social entrepreneurship story that followed his first entrepreneurship story in the construction business. But it would not be complete without the founding of SaniShop. Have a look at what the website says about SaniShop:
“The World Toilet Organization pioneered the creation of SaniShop — a social enterprise that improves sanitation conditions globally by empowering local entrepreneurs. The organization started its market-based approach in Cambodia in 2009 in collaboration with the University of North Carolina, Lien Aid and iDE in Kampung Speu.” (SaniShop)
Here, you not only learn what the mission of SaniShop is but who is behind the enterprise, including a quite well-known U.S. university. But we are still on the surface of decluttering how the WTO and SaniShop actually solve the toilet problem. Just founding one organization to then found another social enterprise obviously does not do a thing, right? So, let us read on and learn more about the actual business model of SaniShop:
“SaniShop’s social franchise model has a participatory approach, not just focusing on rural households as customers, but also engaging and empowering them as part of the solution. The SaniShop ecosystem revolves around a business model where local sales entrepreneurs trigger demand in their community through sales and awareness events, working alongside local influencers.
Toilets are then built and supplied by local masons who have undergone SaniShop production training. SaniShop’s low-cost and high-quality toilet products are made with locally available materials and local masons who have the knowledge on maintenance and repairs.” (SaniShop)
This information is crucial because it explains to you how the toilets finally make it to the (poor) people. The model seems to be absolutely great and working, especially because it works with the people inside the existing eco-system. The local sales people are crucial. If an academic from Berlin or Munich went to some poor rural community trying to sell toilets, I doubt it would be such a big hit. This is not because I am not convinced that academics can be trained in sales. It is because selling these kinds of products requires much trust. And trust is something very hard to build up for outsiders. In addition, the value that is being created for the community is not limited to the actual product. It is about fostering the entire business eco-system. As it says further down on the website:
“This simple market-based model is easily adaptable, replicable, scalable, and localised to suit the needs of the community. The model is also driven by the spirit of entrepreneurship — focusing on the last-mile entrepreneur — who has the drive, energy, motivation, local connections and understanding to change perceptions and behaviours around sanitation, facilitating demand creation.” (SaniShop)
I am not going into the details of product-market fit and scalability here. Assuming that everything that is shown on the website is actually in line with the facts, this is a working social entrepreneurship model that achieves what Sim wants to achieve: It solves a global human problem with toilets. It sounds quite simple but as you can see from the short business story above, it takes a smart organizational setup to implement the vision. And implementation is exactly the keyword when now contrasting (social) entrepreneurship with (academic) activism. Here is a definition of activism:
“[T]he process of campaigning in public or working for an organization in order to bring about political or social change.” (Collins)
Of course, the meaning you derive always depends on the definition you choose — and you will find plenty of definitions. If you look at scholarly sources, there are also quite humorous explorations by scholars who directly deal with “academic activism” (Martin). But I am not writing to satisfy a definition contest. I am writing to find out what comes out of all this. So, let us look at the estimated number of toilets that the aspired academic conference will most likely, based on experiential evidence, bring to the people in the world:
0.
Alright, just to be a little more systematic and detailed here with respect to the measures that differentiate academic activism and social entrepreneurship. We will also just base it on the evidence at hand:
If you had a sanitation problem in your country or city — who would you trust to fix it?
When looking at the chart, it is important to emphasize that the two, activism and entrepreneurship do not exclude each other. Of course, the two can be used complementarily but they do not have to. Activism is mostly there to raise awareness of a problem and entrepreneurship solves the problem. You can do the latter without the former but not vice versa. This is also what the WTO case study teaches us: Sim founded the WTO for the visibility, mobilization, and probably the donation part. That, the formation of an organization, in and of itself is an entrepreneurial endeavor. But he would not have succeeded without fixing the problem. This is why the social entrepreneurship part is needed, it is essential.
By the way, did I mention that I will be teaching a seminar on “Social Entrepreneurship” next semester?
When I chose the course topic, I had no idea how demanded the topic would be in the field, as it appears. So, I am very thankful to the organizers of giving me the opportunity to use their conference as a case study for explaining the topic. This was actually on my to do list. After I had come up with the course title, someone told me I should better provide a very clear description of what social entrepreneurship means, so the students would understand it. I am very happy I have this off my list now.
Talking about lists — As daily readers of my blog know, I always end with a set of “Reflection Questions.” Today, however, since we are talking about entrepreneurship, I will close with “Action Items.” If there is one thing you have learned from this, it is that entrepreneurship is about actually doing things. In business you usually have action items as the take aways from a meeting, not ‘thinking items.’ My action items are intended to help the organizers in their further conference preparation. The underlying assumption is, at least from my perspective, that academic resources in the humanities should be used for solving human problems. Or is this a New Humanities approach? There are many items one could list but as always, I am going to leave it at three.
Action Items
1) Invite Sim to talk about social entrepreneurship and explain the franchise model in detail.
2) Allocate time at the conference to write a business plan for a social enterprise that fixes a problem the humanities are thinking about — apart from toilets.
3) Execute the business plan.