Everyone has toilets, right? Everyone has a place in their home or neighborhood where they can go and release their waste cleanly, right? Wrong. Two billion people in the world in 2019 did not have a toilet or any basic sanitary place to release their body’s unwanted waste. Two billion people can’t go to the bathroom without putting viruses and diseases into their water supply. In a world where we can send men off to space and it is not national news, have everyone and their friends have a device that only lets you access it with your fingerprint, and where 1.73 million people fly up in a plane everyday, the fact that 2 Billion people can’t comfortably go to the bathroom without slowly killing themselves is depressing.

In many third world nations, the sanitation in certain areas is a serious issue. With no real plumbing in many villages and communities, people have nowhere to go to the bathroom, so they go wherever. This is putting many diseases into the air that people breathe in everyday. It also causes contamination in their water supplies. After rain falls, the excess waste, either in liquid or solid form, can run-off into streams and rivers that entire communities rely on. These water sources are used to clench thirst, clean off people, clean off wounds, wash food, grow crops and do many other countless responsibilities for the community. This water that is a necessity also has your dinner from 3 days ago, in the form of your poop. Many people get grossed out by having somebody else drink out of their water bottle. Now imagine how grossed out one would be if that same person did that and someone else’s waste is lurking around in that water. It is totally inhumane and is causing terrible problems for many people. 4.0% of all the deaths in the world stem from people drinking unsanitary, contaminated water. But that number is inflated to 80% in third world parts of Africa. Four out of every Five deaths stems from bad water. Diseases also come from this poor sanitation situation as well. 500,000 deaths happen a year from people having diarrhea. Diarrhea can be caused by contamination in food and water, two things immensely affected by bad sanitation.As a result of the poor conditions that these people are living in, millions of them are dying.

This problem is not going unnoticed, though. Bill Gates, the creator of one of the largest businesses in the world, Microsoft, and a man with a net worth of $104.9 Billion, is making a change. His foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is creating a toilet that does not need a modern plumbing system to operate; a toilet that uses human waste to filter and make clean water to drink or use for crops and generate power to do it again, a toilet that will cost families less than $0.05 a day to use. This toilet is going to allow these families to keep themselves clean, give them clean water and fresh crops, and, most importantly, keep their community clean. Bill and Melinda have invested a lot of money into it ($400 million to be exact) and they believe that this will work. Bill feels that once these toilets get going and operating, that the amount of diseases and viruses spread due to poor sanitation will be cut in half over just one year. This project can change the world.

Something so simple in our lives may change the world forever. A toilet is something that people use everyday and don’t even think about it. But what Bill and Melinda Gates are doing is changing the world and is going to change the world forever.