Scaling Sanitation with Smarter Data: SOIL’s work with ID Insight

At SOIL, we're on a mission to transform urban sanitation for underserved communities through our innovative EkoLakay service. But as we scale the service to reach 8,000 households in northern Haiti by March 2027, having easy access to real-time, robust data and performance indicators at our fingertips will be imperative. Which is why we teamed up with IDinsight, a mission-driven advisory, analytic, and research organization that helps global development leaders maximize their social impact, and, together, we built a comprehensive data platform that brings our data together, supports better decision-making, and enables high-quality reporting for current and future partners.

SOIL has always treated data as central to our work. Our field teams in Haiti collect detailed operational data daily, finance tracks revenue and analyzes costs, and the SOIL leadership team relies on key performance indicators to steer our growth and support our vision.

For years, however, this data lived in separate systems. Operational information from field teams flowed into one platform, while financial information was maintained in accounting software so, in order to create a unified overview, SOIL used a Google Sheets dashboard that manually pulled from the various sources and attempted to present consolidated indicators. This setup served SOIL for a time, but several constraints became more pronounced as the EkoLakay service grew and as conversations about scale and results-based financing advanced.

Our new platform went live earlier this year and our teams now have one place where they can access up-to-date operational and financial indicators. Instead of reconciling multiple spreadsheets and system exports, they can trace metrics back to a shared data warehouse and clearly documented calculations. This has increased the team’s confidence in the numbers that guide internal decisions and external reporting.

“Aesthetically, it is night and day between what we were using and what we have now… I do not need to check different reports, because we know the data is going into a warehouse, and we can look back at the calculations. We have a single source for our data,”

– Nick Preneta, Chief Operating Officer (SOIL)

You can read more details about the partnership and the reasoning behind SOIL’s investment in the right-fit data infrastructure in this article written by the IDInsight team. We are very grateful for their guidance and support.