11 results for tag: household toilets
Strategies for Change: SOIL’s Partnership with Appleseed
SOIL’s mission is to deliver safe, dignified, and affordable ecological sanitation services to households in Haiti and to increase sanitation access for all who want and need it. As readers of our blog know, one of the ways we do this is by providing in-home toilets and removing waste from communities via our EkoLakay services. A monthly service fee is collected from our customers which helps to cover the cost of the household toilet rental, weekly container collection & replacement, and waste treatment service. The customer fee helps to generate a stream of revenue for SOIL’s service to contribute to operational costs. However, customer fees ...
Client Story: Meet Edeline La Fosse
EkoLakay customer, Edeline La Fosse, with SOIL staff Carine Roberts and Algate Joseph
SOIL is committed to empowering the communities we serve and creating a dignified, affordable and satisfactory service for all of our clients. This year, we’re focused on improving the cost efficiency of the service, increasing the number of EkoLakay clients, and testing a variety of improvements in our composting waste treatment process. Our goal is to provide a sustainable household sanitation service of the highest quality that meets the needs of the most vulnerable populations.
We recently sat down with one of our EkoLakay clients, Edeline La Fosse, to learn ...
Stanford Webinar: Container Based Sanitation Solutions
As the population of urban slums around the world expands, so does the risk of public health catastrophes associated with poor sanitation. Learn more about the role container-based sanitation (CBS) can play in areas without conventional household toilets or sewage systems at a webinar organized by the Water, Health and Development Program at Stanford University. A panel of experts working in Haiti, Kenya and Ghana discuss their experiences and findings on this innovative approach to safely managing human waste, including recent studies showing residents of low-income communities are willing to pay for subscription CBS services. The webinar introduces ...
Record EkoLakay Installations
Last week, SOIL’s EkoLakay team installed a record 31 toilets in a single day. The majority of the toilets were installed in Quartier Morin, a neighborhood located on the national road between SOIL's waste treatment site and Cap-Haitien. We left the office in the morning planning to install 20 toilets in Quartier Morin, but as the installation team worked its way around the neighborhoods with a baskil full of toilets and installation materials, we attracted quite a bit of attention! "What is EkoLakay? How can I have one?" neighbors asked. The EkoLakay team is an all-star group of salespeople and hygiene promoters, and it didn’t take them ...
Theatre Group Promotes SOIL EcoSan Toilets in Haiti
In order to reach people who would most benefit from ecological sanitation, such as those in Cap-Haitien’s crowded slums without modern plumbing or electricity, SOIL is using innovative methods to break down cultural barriers towards ecological sanitation. SOIL has been collaborating with a small theatre group to develop a 20-minute sketch promoting the EcoSan toilets SOIL has been providing and maintaining over the years. Here is recap of the story, for entertainment, and for a better understanding of common obstacles SOIL has overcome over the years. The play opens with the main character Djabolo speaking of his family’s many trials: they are ...
Haiti Business Week: SOIL Develops Economic Model for Sustainable Sanitation in Haiti"
February 28, 2013 By Marina Vatav for Haiti Business Week As Haiti tries to improve its people's quality of life and boost tourism, there is one important issue that remains to be solved: poor sanitation infrastructure. Lack of toilets and a poor sanitation system facilitate the spread of diseases, intimidate foreign visitors, and affect the quality of life of many Haitian people. According to Unicef (2010 report) only 10% of rural Haitians and less than 25% of those in cities have access to adequate sanitation facilities, by far the lowest coverage in the Western Hemisphere. Building a modern sewer system would cost billions of dollars; however, ...
An update from our partners at Re.Source
As many of you know, the Household Toilet Project is now in full swing, with 150 families in Shada, Cap-Haitien, using their beautiful household toilets on a daily basis. SOIL's partner organization Re.Source is in the process of checking back in with everyone in Shada to gather information about how people are feeling about the toilets. Here's an excerpt from their latest blog post: "The work doesn’t end when you install the toilets. That’s when it begins. Since deploying our toilets in November, we’ve been working closely with our friends at SOIL to refine the collection service, to make it faster, more convenient, and more enjoyable for our ...
SOIL Letters: From Shada to SOIL's Supporters
[box type="shadow"]SOIL Letters is a blog series featuring some of the beautiful letters we've received over the years in support of the work we're doing in Haiti.[/box]
Dear Friends, Many of you who have supported us through the years are familiar with the community of Shada. Some of you may have even been lucky enough to visit and meet some of our amazing friends and colleagues there who are working tirelessly to create change in their community. Shada is home to over 1,200 families, covering about 2.5 square kilometers of land along the river that passes through Cap Haitien. Sanitation coverage is almost non-existent and the community is subject ...
Bringing the Toilets Home
Written by our friends at re.source – a start-up team based out of Stanford University, funded by a Grand Challenges Explorations Phase 1 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The re.source team is partnering with SOIL to help design an improved household EcoSan toilet and a social business model for providing household sanitation in urban slums. See other blog posts by the re.source team here. We’re launching! We installed 25 toilets in Shada on October 30th, reaching a milestone we’ve been working toward for more than a year. It marks the culmination of many hours of design, prototyping, community meetings, surveying, training, ...
SOIL On Track to Meet Clinton Global Initiative Commitments
As one of the only organizations providing complete sanitation in Haiti - toilets and treatment - SOIL takes its commitments to increasing sanitation access very seriously. In 2011 we applied, and were accepted, to the Clinton Global Initiative's Haiti Action Network. We have used this forum to publicly state our objectives for increasing sanitation access and to support an international initiative to increase accountability for international organizations in Haiti. Today I'm proud to announce that SOIL successfully achieved their CGI commitment of providing clean and dignified sanitation to 20,000 people living in Port-au-Prince’s IDP camps and ...