Geolocating SOIL Toilets

If you’ve ever tried to navigate through either of Haiti’s two largest cities, you might know that it’s a bit challenging. Street names and addresses are rarely marked. And to make things worse, SOIL’s EkoLakay household toilets are being installed in densely-populated urban communities that were built up in an ad hoc manner as people moved from the countryside into the city. This means that many of communities served by EkoLakay have only small pathways between houses and are not accessible by car. As SOIL’s toilet business grows, this can make it difficult for our employees to find which house is part of the service!

In order to address this issue, our Cap-Haitien EkoLakay Program Coordinator, Marion, trained three other SOIL employees in GPS basics so that we can take the coordinates of every SOIL toilet in Haiti. So far over 400 SOIL EkoLakay toilets have been mapped,and we’re hard at work completing the effort.

In the future, EkoLakay contracts will list both the street address (if it’s known) and the GPS coordinates of the toilet served. That will ensure any member of the SOIL team can always locate a client’s house, and will also help us optimize collection routes to be as efficient as possible as we continue adding households in each community.

Keep Reading? Check out these popular posts from the SOIL Blog

[wpp range=monthly order_by=views post_type=post stats_views=0 freshness=1 limit=4]