Jack Sim has a passion in life the toilet

Jack Sim has a passion in life: the toilet. Probably the place in the world that we frequent most and talking less. This small Chinese amusing, never run out of a good story, decided to devote his life. In 2001, for forty years, fortune to Singapore in real estate, he seeks a meaning to his life. Concerned about the deplorable state of the public toilets in Singapore, he discovered a great forgotten humanitarian cause. Nearly 2.5 billion people, 40 of the world's population, do not have access to toilets. Disease of one million children die. Great souls prefer to focus on water rather than to the latrines and sewers. Jack Sim will be used. In its way. "Governments don't care, because they are interested only in the great work." Humanitarian workers are in the assistance. As soon as they leave, nobody has what they installed. The only solution is the market. The poor must buy their bathrooms and give them want to do!

While in France already preparing with great fanfare burial of liberalism, guilty of have plunged us into a secular crisis, on the other side of the planet there about him, and its methods to get out of people in poverty. The first theorized this iconoclastic approach, far regular charity, is an American researcher of Indian origin, C.K. Prahalad. In 2004, he popularized the concept of "base of the pyramid" (1) to describe the fate of the some 4 billion people who live in the world with less than 5 dollars a day (according to the World Bank). He and many other authors to his suite, the development of the market, and the involvement of enterprises, are much more effective to fight against poverty, assistance or donation. The rediscovery of Adam Smith, who postulated in the 18th century that the market and the call for freedom and the individual interest were the most powerful engine of prosperity. As Jack Sim said: "the poor are not more rational than the rich, they want the statutory. Should they be proud of what they buy and they envy the neighbor who has already, even for a toilet.

Behind this approach, two assumptions. The first is economic. In designing responsive and accessible financially for the poor products, businesses open a considerable market while minimizing the flagrant injustice that today ' today the poor pay their water, their credit or their ten-cent times drugs more expensive than the rich. The second is moral. Transform a helped in consumer, it is him making his freedom, dignity and self-esteem of himself.

And it works. Jack Sim has applied a genuine strategy of contractor. Fan of good words, he called the WTO, "World Toilet Organization" association. Then he became the speaker and the Coordinator of all local initiatives around the world. It creates the World Toilet Day, which took place on November 19. Then the World Toilet Forum to bring together experts in the subject. The bathroom he did design are sold $ 7 in Bangladesh, Cambodia and in 50 countries by networks of local entrepreneurs and associations. Features of the World Entrepreneurship Forum, organized recently by the EMLyon school (2), he travels the world, collecting awards and sponsorships of companies.

From this theory of the market applied to the poorest, we saw then to deploy two approaches. More mercantile as intending to do any of these 4 billions of people a great relay to the growth of Western countries failed. It is into this breach are are niche companies such as Unilever, Danone or Essilor, but also Tata with its Nano car in designing products corresponding to the needs of these populations. The other approach was popularized by the Nobel Mohammed Yunus, who introduced the notion of "social business". It uses the tools of the market but there is no benefit. It fully reinvests them in local development. Under his rule, Danone has installed small factories of yoghurt in Bangladesh. It is obviously also the approach of Jack Sim is not remunerated and only has a team of six people since everything is done by the partners, humanitarian or business. But as Westerners discovered, all is not rosy in the land of the free market. A competitor who believed malignant sold a toilet model to $ 6. But its quality was poor, broken and ruined the credibility of the entire project. Because as we have learned recently at our expense, a market, it is control and is domestic. Whether $ 7 toilets or financial products to 1,000 billion. And this is the current paradox of a West seeking to reconnect with the collective when billions of people dream more than ever by individual consumers.