Everybody poops. This fact has proved to be a large problem in terms of maintaining the world's sanitation. Recently, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has turned it into something positive.

The foundation explains that 40 percent of the world's population has no contact with flush toilets. They are left to defecate in the open, bringing severe problems. For example, nearly 1.5 billion children die each year from diarrheal diseases.

On July 19, in Kigali, Rwanda, the foundation launched its new initiative to bring safe sanitation services to the world. Their plan begins with the toilet and $42 million to jump start the project. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation’s Global Development Program, explains that the toilet has been the best invention for the world's sanitation. The only problem is that it's not accessible enough for everyone. "We need to reinvent the toilet," she says.

Partnering with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the initiative will support the United Nations’ 2015 Millennium Development Goals with the Sanitation For All project, aiming to reduce the amount of people living without basic sanitation by 50 percent. Together, they will find ways to build hygienic, water conserving, and human waste recycling toilets that can be built and sustained at a low cost. One such initiative is the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge, where Universities around the world race to develop a toilet without pipes, sewer connection or electricity for less than 5 cents a day.

With a reinvented toilet, the possibilities are endless. It will reduce exposure to disease and keep kids in school — ultimately boosting local economies with healthier workers and much lower health care costs. The human waste can become fertilizer and fuel for local communities, and even fresh drinking water. The Reinventing the Toilet Challenge is showing us that human waste really isn’t waste at all.

Sanergy (sanitation+energy) is an MIT-based start-up with a mission: Employ sewage. Produce jobs. One glorified outhouse at a time.

Forty percent of the global population lacks access to adequate sanitation. Where poverty is endemic, so are sanitation challenges. Sanergy’s answer is to tackle both issues at once. Recent winner of the prestigious Echoing Green Fellowship (pdf) and the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Business Plan Contest, their method is simple: build, collect, convert.

Sanergy sells inexpensive, green, pay-per-use or membership-based sanitation centers to local entrepreneurs. Waste deposited into airtight containers is collected and exchanged daily for clean containers. It is then transferred to a central plant where the waste is processed into energy and fertilizer to be sold to the national grid and local farmers, respectively.

In addition to a focus on sustainability, Sanergy has an eye on immediate returns — the company projects their franchisees will make back their investment in about four months, according to NPR.

Sanergy has already scaled to 60 sanitation sites in Nairobi and begun converting waste into fertilizer. They hope to eventually expand to every block of the city’s slums, and ultimately, to all of sub-Saharan Africa and India, turning a socially sticky public health crisis into economic opportunities where they are needed most.

Check out Sanergy's video for more details.

Sanergy Overview from Ani Vallabhaneni on Vimeo.