Gates Foundation’s Request for Letter of Inquiry: Round 3 of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced a new funding opportunity under its Water, Sanitation & Hygiene program which works with partners wot develop sustainable sanitation services that work for everyone. Under this new funding, the Foundation is seeking Letters of Inquiry (LOI) for the third round of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge.

The Reinvent the Toilet Challenge is designed to prototype a means of dealing effectively and cost-efficiently with human waste for the 2.5 billion people on earth who currently lack access to safe and affordable sanitation.

Successful applicants will participate in the next phase of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge by designing, prototyping and testing entirely stand-alone, self-contained, practical sanitation modules which intake bodily wastes or fecal sludge collected from pit latrines and septic tanks and swiftly dispose of them without any incoming water piping, outgoing sewer piping or electric or gas utility services. These modules must intake all outputs of the serviced population – ultimately at single-residence scales (smaller-scale individual family toilet solutions) or group of households (larger-scale neighborhood fecal sludge processor solutions)– with minimal module footprints and assured biosafety. The anticipated capital and operational cost for the final products (commercial units) is expected to be less than $0.05/user/day, both for the family and neighborhood solutions. The design should anticipate the effects and fate of complementary sanitary products entering the system such as paper, cloth, sand, and other personal hygiene products and chemicals.

This RFP will use a mandatory two-step application process. The first step requires the submission of a Letter of Inquiry (LOI) in the form of a 5 page concept note, detailed in the RFLOI Overview and Guidelines. After evaluation of all LOIs received, the foundation will contact those applicants who are eligible and have projects of further interest to complete step two—the submission of a full proposal. If invited to submit a full proposal, instructions on the preparation of the proposal will be provided at the time of invitation.

The deadline to submit applications is 8 November 2012. For more information, visit this link.