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The founder of Microsoft was the host of Reinvented Toilet Expo. His pitch? To market futuristic toilets that do not require water or sewage.
"Today, rich countries have a sewer system in which you bring water, drop human waste and end up in a treatment plant," Gates said. at CNN.
"This requires the installation of many pipes, which is very expensive and will not happen in these poorer, newer cities."
According to the WHO, about 2.3 billion people still do not have basic sanitation facilities such as toilets or latrines.
Mr. Gates pointed out that the pot in his hand could contain "up to 200 trillion rotavirus … 20 billion shigella bacteria and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs".
The lack of clean sanitation has a staggering financial cost – The Gates Foundation estimates that $ 223 billion a year in increased spending on health care and lost productivity and wages.
As part of the Gates Foundation's "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge," Bill and Melinda Gates donated $ 200 million to teams seeking to develop waterless toilets in the last seven years.
To be competitive, the toilets had to cost less than 5 cents a day to operate, without the need for external electricity or running water.
The foundation has funded scientists who have invented stand-alone toilets: they recover human waste, eliminate dangerous pathogens, and convert the resulting materials into potentially valuable products, such as drinking water, electricity and fertilizers.
Gates has chosen to sell his land in a country that is struggling to clean up its facilities. In 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a national "toilet revolution". Second largest economy since 2010, China has significantly improved public hygiene, but many rural cities still do not have access to modern toilets.
Gates noted that the production of these toilets was in its initial phase and that it would take at least a decade before reinvented toilets reach the masses in the poorest areas.
"The first ones are still quite expensive, and it will take time for the volume to reach its lowest level on the market," said Gates.
"But that's how we started it, and here we have a lot of enthusiasm for it to be cheap enough to cover Africa, which would not happen without this breakthrough."
