Devex: How a new toolkit is helping nonprofits like SOIL budget for risk
Devex's recent article highlighted SOIL's partnership with the Open Road Foundation, who helped us overcome literal road blocks and plan for future risk. Open Road's support allowed us to continue to grow EkoLakay, our partnership with the Haitian government, and a model research site designed to support the replication of SOIL’s work around Haiti and the world.
From Devex:
"Every NGO faces roadblocks at one point or another. But SOIL, an organization working to address the sanitation problem in Haiti, was literally prevented from getting from point A to point B. ...
SOIL Staff Summer Project Bears Fruit
The SOIL team takes a lot of pride both in our lush office gardens and in the various plants that flourish throughout our composting sites. We love to encourage biodiversity by planting a wide variety of local species - whether that’s coconut trees, mango trees, or smaller flowery bushes like the beautiful bougainvillea seen throughout Haiti. In the backyards of our offices and across the country, these plants attract birds and insects and act as a peaceful oasis for many other species.
Each day SOIL transforms human waste into rich, organic compost and this summer ...
TeleSur: Organization Improves Sanitation in Haiti With Toilets
We're excited to share that TeleSur English featured SOIL's EkoLakay household composting toilet service as a uniquely viable solution to the sanitation crisis in Haiti. The article features excerpts from a recent NPR-KGOU interview with our Deputy Director, Nick Preneta. Read on!
From TeleSur English:
"SOIL provides a household toilet service called EkoLakay. Customers rent a locally-made eco-friendly composting toilet in their home for approximately US$3-4 per month. The organization [collects] the full buckets and transports the waste to its compost sites, where ...
With Thanks and Gratitude
Dear friends and supporters,
On behalf of the entire team here at SOIL, thank you. Together, we surpassed our goal and raised over $17,000 in support of SOIL's lifesaving household toilet program, EkoLakay. Because of your kind support, our team will be able to hit the streets and spread the word about our growing service.
This year, we're focused on reducing the costs of providing the service to clients, increasing the number of EkoLakay clients in our service areas, and testing a variety of improvements to the EkoLakay service. Our goal is to provide a truly ...
NPR’s KGOU: Organization Strives To Improve Sanitation In Haiti One Toilet At A Time
SOIL’s deputy director Nick Preneta sat down with NPR in Oklahoma to talk about the sanitation crisis and the transformative power of SOIL’s EkoLakay composting toilets. He discussed the impact of SOIL’s social business approach to ecological sanitation, and how we’re collaborating with other container based sanitation projects around the world to grow and refine our model.
From the interview with NPR affiliate KGOU:
“People often see [poop] as a waste but we look at it as a resource. And so our model, we cover the entire sanitation chain and we look ...
EkoLakay Goes – Faster!
Nine months ago I wrote with great excitement (and to be honest, a few nerves) about SOIL’s brand new data management initiative for EkoLakay, our household toilet service. EkoLakay is now serving about 1,000 families, and as you can imagine, with weekly waste collections, monthly subscription fees, maintenance requests, and more, there’s a [poop]load of information to manage!
SOIL’s new system uses Taroworks, an Android app, so that our EkoLakay team can both view and collect data on mobile phones, even while offline. When connected to the internet, the phones ...
SOIL Embraces Mobile Banking for Sanitation Service Payments
For a small monthly fee SOIL’s growing social business, EkoLakay, provides over 1,000 households in Haiti with ecological sanitation (EcoSan) toilets and waste treatment services. And, until recently, that meant that we visited all 1,000+ homes on the EkoLakay service every single month to collect their monthly service fee. As you can imagine, this door-to-door payment collection effort was time consuming and costly for SOIL and often inconvenient for clients.
We are therefore delighted to announce that SOIL’s EkoLakay team has introduced mobile payments into the ...
SOIL team saddened by US withdrawal from Paris Climate Agreement
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 ...
Published Research Confirms SOIL’s Composting Method is Effective
At SOIL, we love teaming up with scientists to explore how ecological sanitation works. And one of the main pillars of our ecological sanitation operation is transforming environment-polluting poop into nutrient-rich compost. To do this, we follow the World Health Organization (WHO) standards for human waste composting – creating piles with the ideal ratio of poop to cover material so that natural heat-tolerant bacteria will get to work and break the materials down and destroy pathogens. These piles get hot! At peak temperatures, an average pile will reach 160 degrees ...
200 Pounds of Compost, Over 7,000 Kilometers and 1 Partnership
In a neat new research collaboration with implications on how we use and market compost in Haiti, SOIL is working with researchers at Cranfield University in the UK to evaluate the agricultural impact of SOIL's compost (Konpòs Lakay).
This work can be summarized in numbers:
2 students
will research the potential of Konpòs Lakay as part of their Master’s theses in the university’s greenhouse and laboratories. A third student will research a different kind of organic fertilizer to serve as a comparison. For this purpose,
200 pounds
of SOIL's Konpòs Lakay ...
