Flush with success: How social enterprises are scaling up to meet global sanitation challenges

Introduction: How can Small and Medium-Sized Social Enterprises (SMSE) help meet our enormous global sanitation challenges? What's holding them back, and how can governments, businesses, donors, and academia support them to achieve the scale required? To answer these questions, the “Flush With Success” roundtable on 14 June 2023, co-hosted by Cranfield School of Management, Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) and the Container Based Sanitation Alliance (CBSA), brought together sanitation experts, social entrepreneurs and researchers to share the hurdles and opportunities of supporting growth through the provision of facilities and services in the sector. WSUP Chief Executive Ed Mitchell noted, global sanitation “is a challenge that is so big that no one organisation can solve it or even begin to solve it.” This report summarises the diverse contributions of the roundtable’s panel as well as input from more than 50 international participants, all facilitated by CBSA Executive Director Rémi Kaupp. Discussions surfaced several systemic issues faced by actors in the sanitation sector when trying to achieve scale. In this report, these are organised according to the five Strategic Areas of the WSUP Urban WASH sector Functionality Evaluative Framework