Event Description
The World Sanitation Financing Facility (WSFF) is an open collaborative working group of sanitation, finance and commerce actors, committed to breaking down the silos in which we all operate and to transforming sanitation into a vibrant, everyday human economic activity. The side event will present the WSFF and its objectives, and increase understanding and commitment towards this transformation.

Event Summary and Conclusions
During the WSFF side event Arthur Wood, the convenor of the WSFF, provided an overview of the group and its objectives. He outlined how players from sanitation, social innovation, finance, commerce and law are coming together to collaborate on how to bridge the funding gap between grant finance and for profit investment. He discussed the potential for the sector in connecting the sanitation market in a streamlined capital flow. This will involve the WSFF studying the possible business lines for sanitation and assessing the opportunities for commercial involvement.

Jon Lane, the Executive Director of WSSCC, provided comments from the sanitation sector perspective. He made the point that there is focus now on creating demand for sanitation services, but acknowledged that we need to be able to meet that demand. The WSFF can assist in doing this such as by identifying and connecting loan and investment finance to enable entrepreneurs to meet the demand. The 2.5 billion people without toilets don't want to be beneficiaries, but customers.

Dr Maximilian Martin, Senior Partner and Chief Strategist from IJ Partners, provided comments from the finance perspective. He observed that while there is significant potential in the sanitation sector, the market is weak and it is not straightforward to bring capital to it. He commented that "impact investing", where investments in solving social problems are made based on a lower return, is a growing area and there are lessons from the microfinance journey that we can learn from. We need to build an industry around sanitation to enable and coordinate action and we need to decide where and how to invest in the marketplace.  

Questions were interactive. Suggestions were made to include marketing and communications experts in the WSFF group and consider the role of the Government given its critical role in countries to enable the private sector. Clarification was made over the WSFF and how important it was to bring players together and find a common language. The goal now is unfreeze the situation, understand, access and create the market where required in order to strategically move public money and bring in the private sector. All ideas welcome.