Since it was first published in 2015, SOIL's Human Resources Manual has served to guide, unite, protect, and inform SOIL’s staff. The manual, written in Haitian Kreyòl, contains 24 pages with topics ranging from vacation time to salaries, confidentiality, performance evaluation, conflict resolution, and so on. Even though each employee goes over the entirety of the manual with their supervisors, SOIL felt it was worth investing the time in providing even further clarification and training on one subject: workplace harassment. After spending almost a year looking for someone who would offer such a training in Haiti, SOIL was delighted to find ...

What better time than during the dead heat of summer to charge up your smart phone and trek through the urban sprawl of Haiti to interview people about their toilets (or lack thereof)? Undeterred by the heat, this is exactly what the SOIL team has been up to this summer! The Port-au-Prince office just completed the first segment of this marketing research with a satisfaction survey to assess how current EkoLakay customers like their household EcoSan toilet. With just shy of 200 customers in the Ti Plas Kazo neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, our sample size was modest, but the results were fruitful. Over two years ago, a market study SOIL conducted in ...

As we shared last year, the SOIL team was pleased and proud that Haiti signed the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. It was a generous, though symbolic, gesture for a country that only produces 0.01% of global carbon dioxide emissions but bears the impact of climate change more severely than most nations. Amidst valid criticisms that the Paris Agreement should loosen its scrutiny for developing nations and strengthen its overall targets, which have generally been assessed to be weak, Haiti gathered the political will to ratify the Agreement in 2017. Donald Trump recently tweeted that the United States would pull out of the Paris Agreement. For ...

This year's International Women's Day theme is #BeBoldForChange. The World Economic Forum has predicted that the gender gap (which represents gender inequity in areas like health, wages, political representation, and access to and quality of education) won't fully close until 2186 – 169 years from now. Can we leverage International Women's Day as a catalyst to foment bold change and reject this stark forecast? At SOIL, women's voices are at the forefront of our work. Four of SOIL's seven organizational directors are women, including our executive director and co-founder Dr. Sasha Kramer, and three of the five SOIL advisors are women.  ...