Building the Future of Sanitation, Together: Fresh Life and SOIL
As part of our ongoing initiative to spotlight peer learning and partnership across the container-based sanitation (CBS) sector, we sat down with Fresh Life, a CBS provider based in Nairobi, Kenya.
For over a decade, SOIL and Fresh Life have deepened a thought partnership rooted in mutual learning, operational knowledge exchange, and a shared commitment to exploring innovative financing mechanisms in order to build enabling environments for city-wide inclusive sanitation services. In this conversation with Fresh Life Co-Founder and Executive Director, Lindsay Stradley, we explore the origins of Fresh Life, the evolving collaboration between our two teams, and the broader vision we share for the future of safe sanitation in our rapidly urbanizing world.
What does “safe sanitation” look like in action at Fresh Life?
Sanitation is many things, but above all, it’s about dignity and quality of life. It’s a basic human right. At Fresh Life, we believe sanitation means that when you need to go to the bathroom, you have a safe, clean, and comfortable place to do so.
For us, this comes to life through our Fresh Life Toilets shared facilities that serve households within one compound. They’re designed for safety, privacy, and user comfort: built with concrete, stocked with toilet paper, open 24 hours, and come with a handwashing station with soap located outside the toilet.
In Nairobi, one Fresh Life Toilet serves about 34 people, or ten households. In less dense areas like Kisumu or Eldoret Kenya, the number is closer to 20. About 80% of our toilets are household-based, with the rest in schools and markets. Our biggest limitation to expansion is space.
That tension between limited space and the need for safe sanitation is one Fresh Life and SOIL know well. In Cap-Haïtien, SOIL’s EkoLakay toilets serve families in flood-prone, tightly packed neighborhoods where sewers don’t exist. In Nairobi, Fresh Life faces the same reality finding ways to make high-quality sanitation fit into small footprints, while protecting privacy and dignity.
Tell us about co-founding Fresh Life. What inspired this venture?
Ever since I was a kid, I have been passionate about the issue of urban poverty. After finishing my undergrad, I spent two years with Teach for America in New Orleans. This experience taught me that while education is transformative, its benefits are cut short without thriving cities with healthy environments and economic opportunity. My Fresh Life journey began with a simple conviction: tackling urban poverty and building stronger cities starts with improving the fundamentals of daily life.
In graduate school I met my co-founders at MIT’s D-Lab. We were asked to design a business solution to a poverty-related problem that affected millions. And then we thought bigger: what about billions?
With over two billion people today lacking safe toilets, sanitation is one of the most urgent and universal challenges humans face.
We approached Fresh Life as a global concept and then looked for cities that would be a good fit for the model. One of the key factors that drew us to Kenya was the already existing huge demand for private sanitation. Many people were paying for sanitation options like pit latrines—or, when none were available, turning to flying toilets. We thought then, could we take that willingness to pay and offer a safer, more reliable service than what was already available for a more affordable price?
Fresh Life started as a micro-enterprise model—toilets run by neighbors as small businesses. Over time, the approach shifted to landlords and head tenants managing toilets in compounds, where sanitation became an asset that increased occupancy and reduced turnover. The economic value was clear, and so was the social one: safer, cleaner, more dignified facilities at a price people could afford.
What are some of the challenges that are unique to your context (Kenya) and how do those affect your CBS model?
Every container-based sanitation (CBS) model is built for the environment in which it operates.
Nairobi’s urban density brought unique challenges. To give you some context, many families live in homes no larger than a 10 x 10 ft room, with neighbors packed closely together. In these neighborhoods, without open space, shared toilets are the only realistic option. A Fresh Life toilet offers clean, private facilities managed through a subscription model that guarantees consistent waste collection and maintenance.
In the early days, we thought the entrepreneurial model would break even quickly and put most of our energy into designing the toilet hardware. But what we learned was that what really made the difference wasn’t the design—it was the service. Like SOIL’s services in Haiti, clean, professional, and reliable collection is now the foundation of the Fresh Life model.
That shift in focus started to change client expectations. Once people saw what was possible, communities began having a higher demand for landlords to provide sanitation services, and that ripple effect eventually grew into the bigger goal of creating the pressure for the government to offer multiple sanitation options for citizens. Like SOIL, we found that the real value of CBS isn’t the toilet itself—it’s the dependable service that keeps it clean and safe.
How did the partnership between SOIL and Fresh Life first come about?
SOIL had already been piloting container-based sanitation in Haiti for a few years before us, and so we had an example to reference when designing our model. SOIL was piloting in-home toilets in Haiti, while we were exploring how to implement shared facilities in Nairobi.
We reached out to partners (like SOIL and Loowatt) often to gather as much knowledge of the sector as we could. This spark of exchange grew into stronger partnerships, and eventually led us to found the Container-Based Sanitation Alliance (CBSA) together.
SOIL and Fresh Life have also both been at the forefront of experimenting with Results-Based Financing. RBF links funding to measurable outcomes, providing accountability while demonstrating the impact of CBS on health, the environment, and quality of life. Together, we’ve helped strengthen the sector’s collective knowledge and positioned CBS as a credible, performance-driven model.
On a personal level, whenever we’re facing a tricky operational challenge or need a fresh perspective on a policy, I know I can reach out to Sasha and the SOIL team. We are strongly aligned in the way we view this work—especially with the belief that CBS has to be deeply integrated with the public sector in order to succeed.
A strong similarity between SOIL and Fresh Life is the engagement of government stakeholders. Can you talk a bit about your approach for building up the enabling environment for sanitation in Nairobi and how this strategy has evolved over time?
Engaging governments has been central to our success. In Nairobi, Kenya Fresh Life began by placing toilets in schools and markets, which not only raised public expectations about sanitation but also created a visible proof of concept that CBS could work. This early visibility helped set the stage for an enabling environment where CBS could take root.
From there, the team worked to ensure that CBS was explicitly recognized in Kenya’s regulatory framework, opening the door for utilities and municipalities to include CBS in their planning and budgets. Similarly, SOIL is working closely with Haiti’s national water and sanitation authority, DINEPA, to formalize CBS through public sector contracts.
In both contexts, the journey starts with policy. Regulations must explicitly support CBS—and more broadly, non-sewered sanitation solutions—as a critical part of achieving universal access. Once regulations are in place, they create political space for utilities and municipalities to incorporate CBS into strategic planning and to braid it into municipal budgets and long-term financing proposals. For example, in Kenya, CBS has now been included in discussions with institutional funders like the African Development Bank in alignment with national regulations, which helps promote broader sanitation access.
But regulation is only the first step. The next challenge—and perhaps the hardest one—is aligning political will with public financing. Utilities and government partners increasingly recognize that CBS can provide safe, effective, and financially sustainable sanitation without sewers, and they want to serve everyone.
The question now is how to increase public budgets and shift allocations so that utilities are resourced to make that vision a reality.
While the current stage that we are in feels daunting, It’s important to step back and recognize how far the sector has come as a whole. Ten or fifteen years ago, CBS was barely on the radar of national governments. Today, policymakers and utilities are not only aware of CBS but are actively seeking ways to integrate it as a sanitation menu option into their systems. That progress reflects years of collaboration, advocacy, and knowledge-sharing across organizations like SOIL and Fresh Life. The road ahead is about shifting political will and securing government financing that translates into scale.
What does success look like for CBS globally, and how do you see partnerships like SOIL and Fresh Life’s helping us get there?
At its simplest, success means safe, dignified sanitation for everyone, everywhere. Achieving this will require a portfolio approach: sewers, septic systems, container-based services, and other innovations working together to meet the diverse needs of growing cities.
CBS is particularly well-suited to dense, peri-urban areas, but it is not the only solution. The goal is not to champion a single technology, but to ensure that every city has a toolkit of options to provide universal coverage. Safe sanitation should be affordable to everyone, everywhere.
Partnerships like SOIL and Fresh Life’s help make this vision possible. By testing models in different contexts, sharing lessons, and advocating together, we are shaping CBS not as a niche intervention, but as a recognized, scalable part of global sanitation systems.
At the end of the day, whether in Cap-Haïtien or Nairobi, the goal is the same: when someone needs a toilet, they have a place that is safe, clean, and dignified. That is the promise and potential of CBS.