Will Tarpeh, a UC Berkeley PhD student in Environmental Engineering, received a DIL Explore grant to travel to
Nairobi, Kenya with team member Ryan Jung. They have partnered with social enterprise Sanergy to create a
sustainable business model for the treatment of pathogenic waste from toilets. Tarpeh and Jung worked with
Sanergy to pilot-test prototypes with users and develop a framework for designing and evaluating business
models for household toilets. Tarpeh explained, “The Explore grant enabled my team to pivot research from
only focusing on the innovation—ammonia disinfection to recovering nutrients from waste—to include
business development and a strategy for eventually bringing the innovation to scale.”
To date, DIL has supported 20 exploratory projects spanning 10 countries on four continents.
Projects funded in Spring 2014 include exploratory research in Ghana, India, Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda.
These new initiatives all combine techniques and insights