A loan helped to provide more than 8000 people with access to toilets in urban slums.


Sanergy's story

This loan may have a higher risk but higher impact. Learn more here.

In light of International Women’s Day week, view Sanergy’s Co-founder & Executive Director Lindsay Stradley’s Ted Talk here!

The Problem
Cities are growing faster than ever. In Kenya, Nairobi hosts 3.5M people, a number that is expected to grow to over 5M by 2030. Currently, over 2.5M of this population lives in slums without adequate access to safe and affordable sanitation. The residents rely on unsanitary options such as “flying toilets” and pit latrines that release untreated human waste into the environment. In sum, 66% of all the waste generated in Nairobi is discharged into open waterways untreated, posing serious risk to public health and the environment.

The Solution
Sanergy is a social enterprise that takes a systems-based approach in solving the sanitation challenge in Africa’s growing cities. The company builds low cost, high quality sanitation facilities branded as ‘Fresh Life’ that are franchised to city residents, usually residential compound owners, who run them as a value-added service to their tenants. Sanergy then collects the waste on a regular basis and converts it into by-products, predominantly organic fertilizer. To date, Sanergy has built a network of over 1,100 entrepreneurs running over 2.300 Fresh Life Toilets and serving 100,000 people daily. They safely collect and remove over 6,000 metric tons of waste from the community every year. Learn more about Sanergy here.

Loan use
With this loan, Sanergy anticipates to serve more urban residents through an additional 200 Fresh Life toilets serving 8,000 people daily.


This loan is special because:

It helps build healthy & prosperous communities by making safe sanitation accessible and affordable for slums



Loan details


Lenders and lending teams




Loan details