11 results for tag: Innovation

Meet Winnie: SOIL’s Research, Innovation and Advocacy Director

Winnie touring and working at SOIL's composting facility in Haiti We’re thrilled to introduce SOIL’s new Research, Innovation and Advocacy Director, Winnie Felix-Jean! Winnie comes to us with a background in microbiology and global public health advocacy and with many years of experience with both clinical research and project management. Winnie has worked as a clinical researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer center where she was responsible for the planning and oversight of the myeloma and hematology services and also led clinical oncology trials. She has consulted for the UN World Food Programme and UNICEF and was a senior manager at IBM ...

From Larvae to Chicken Feed: What’s New with Black Soldier Fly Research

In 2019, the SOIL Research Team began testing out the possibility of using black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) as a new, additional method of transforming waste from our EkoLakay sanitation service into another valuable resource. Led by SOIL Waste-to-Resource Consultant, Michèle Heeb, SOIL experimented with BSFL at our composting site in Northern Haiti and found that our EkoLakay waste was indeed suitable for this exciting technology. The Research Team even managed to breed the flies in captivity, a prerequisite for the technology to work on a large scale. These promising results made us hopeful that this innovative waste-to-resource technology could ...

Upcoming SOIL and CBSA Study: Comparing Costs of Urban Sanitation Solutions

photo credit: Vic Hinterlang With more than four billion people still lacking access to safe sanitation globally, we know that it’s going to take a multitude of innovative solutions to successfully tackle a crisis of this proportion. Citywide Inclusive Sanitation–the idea that a variety of alternatives to traditional sewer systems will be needed to “genuinely deliver universal coverage across whole urban areas” – has been gaining strong momentum in recent years. This notion that a one-size-fits-all solution to the global sanitation crisis is not realistic means that municipalities need comparative data on all sanitation solutions so that ...

Boosting Efficiency and Designing for Resilience

Lukas and Jojo didn’t just observe the processes, they jumped in to get a hands on review of how it all worked! As a leader in container-based sanitation, SOIL is always looking for ways to optimize our process and take the work we do to the next level. SOIL’s research team has been working on a human-centered design project that takes a step back to evaluate the efficiency of every step of the sanitation service chain. To do this, SOIL recently teamed up with Swiss design business KreativKonsum and composting toilet business Kompotoi. They came to visit us in Cap-Haïtien in February where they looked at everything from SOIL’s equipment and ...

Referral Bonuses or Toilet Paper?

As a non-profit research and development organization creating groundbreaking sanitation solutions in Haiti, SOIL gathers data like it's our job (it is!). We closely track feedback from familys using EkoLakay's service and a wide variety of other impact metrics that help us evaluate SOIL's work such as the quantity of waste treated or the amount of compost sold. Not only does this allow SOIL to stimulate our own learning to assess the success of our efforts and support global replication, but it also helps us continue to innovate and refine our model. For many non-profits and social enterprises, developing systems that enable data-informed ...

Optimizing the Composting Process: Research Updates from Port-au-Prince

Gavin McNicol, who has long been active in SOIL’s research partnership with Dr. Rebecca Ryals, had the opportunity to visit us at SOIL’s composting waste treatment site just outside of Haiti’s capital city in earlier this year. In 2016, Gavin joined Dr. Ryals ongoing research investigating SOIL’s climate impact and helped spearhead research on the optimal conditions for the composting process. Gavin took a moment to share an update on the ongoing research as well as a sneak peek on a new research project that we are workin...

USAID’s Global Waters: Innovation for the World’s Most Intractable Problems

SOIL was honored to join bright minds from around the globe to discuss solutions to some of the world's most intractable problems during last month's Global Innovation Week in Washington D.C.  The Innovation Marketplace, hosted by USAID's Global Development Lab, welcomed SOIL and other global innovators to showcase new technologies and interventions in the WASH sector and beyond. Luckily for our blog readers that weren't able to join us in DC, USAID's GlobalWaters.org shared the story of SOIL's work to build sustainable solutions to meaningfully respond to Haiti's sanitation crisis. From the article: "Molly Case, deputy development direct...

What You Do Want To Know About Haiti’s Sewage Problems

Photo: Tony Marcelli. How Haiti’s Innovative Sanitation Solutions Are Spreading Across the World Earlier this summer I opened my voicemail to a message from my dear friend Anne, who had left a message for me during her evening commute. She called me from the side of the road after having been so deeply moved by an unexpected NPR segment on the sanitation crisis in Haiti and the courage of Haiti’s latrine cleaners, the bayakou, across the country. Unlike Anne, who has long known of SOIL’s work to transform waste in Haiti, most loyal NPR listeners in the US learned about Haiti’s sewage system - or lack thereof - for the first time that day ...

SOIL Enters the Cloud

Over the past few months you may have heard that SOIL is going mobile. We have been so excited to implement a new system for managing customer data - this is a huge step for SOIL in refining our EkoLakay household toilet service and ensuring we are able to significantly increase the number of customers we serve without compromising the quality of our service. SOIL’s Systems Director, Erica Lloyd, is the mastermind hard at work behind the scenes designing and implementing our new data system using TaroWorks, an Android mobile app, and Salesforce, a business database, to build a system that can collect and manage customer contact information, ...

The MOON: The problem is the SOILution, An interview with Sasha Kramer

"Sasha Kramer is a slight, blonde former New Yorker who got a Ph.D. in ecology from Stanford University in 2006, the same year she co-founded SOIL (Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods)—a nonprofit headquartered in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. SOIL’s mission is to “promote dignity, health, and sustainable livelihoods through the transformation of wastes into resources.” In other words, composting human wastes to create the rich, black soil that Haiti desperately needs, while eliminating the pathogens and pollution the country doesn’t need. SOIL doesn’t intend to do this for Haitians, but to support them in undertaking this work—as a ...