104 results for tag: sanitation
Renewed hope in the new year and proud reflections of the past year
Members of the SOIL EkoLakay team.
It’s the beginning of a new year and the SOIL team is heading into 2023 with renewed hope and mindful optimism. Despite the ongoing political, social & health-related challenges of last year that significantly impacted our staff and our customers, there are also great achievements to celebrate, particularly among the members of our team in Haiti, who, despite the considerable hardships, worked tirelessly and together and didn’t lose hope. We are deeply grateful to each and every one. In October, when the first new cases of cholera were reported, SOIL sprang into action, understanding that our EkoLakay ...
Sanitation. Dignity. Hope.
Sanitation. Dignity. Hope. Three matters of substance that we here at SOIL use to guide our daily efforts and attention. As we look back on another challenging year, it is apparent that Haiti’s vulnerable populations are at risk of bearing the greatest burden of the ongoing economic, social, and political instability in the country. It is critical that SOIL continues to expand our service and reach even more households with essential access to sanitation, a basic human right and a life-saving technology, that also provides hope to the families we serve during these difficult times. Sanitation/ Sanitasyon “SOIL is an organization that ...
A conversation with SOIL’s Keurlit Charles
Keurlit Charles, SOIL's Field Operations Supervisor
We are continuing to engage in conversations with members of SOIL’s sanitation staff in Cap-Haitien to learn about the ways they are navigating the current situation in Haiti with their family and in their community. This week, we spoke with Keurlit Charles, SOIL’s Field Operations Supervisor, to check in and hear how the ongoing crisis in Haiti is impacting his work and his home. Interviewer: How are you and your family doing right now? Keurlit: Like every Haitian, my family and I fight to try to make a living. My family depends on my income from my job at SOIL because the other ...
Deriving financial benefit from SOIL’s climate mitigation action: is it possible?
Ground-breaking research on SOIL’s ecological sanitation service, published in the journal, Nature Climate Change, investigated the potential for container-based sanitation to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions when compared to other traditional waste treatment methods. The research revealed that SOIL’s service and method off off-site waste treatment effectively mitigates significant and measurable greenhouse gas emissions. The research is an exciting development for the sanitation sector and opens up the opportunity to explore carbon credits as a way to derive financial benefit, or additional revenue, from the service’s emission reduction ...
Sharing Our Story with Carel Pedre
Carel Pedre speaking with SOIL's Senior Manager, Romel Toussaint
In recent weeks, there has been a sudden flurry of interest in the value of human waste in the Haitian media, leading to increased attention, and sometimes head-scratching speculation, as to the ins and outs of SOIL’s work. SOIL was delighted at this new peak in interest and wanted to use this as an opportunity to answer some of the questions that were being asked with regard to SOIL’s work with waste - and exactly what we were doing with that waste! In order to share more of the real story about our innovative sanitation solution, SOIL reached out to renowned Haitian journalist and ...
SOIL at Expo 2020 Dubai
In 2019, SOIL was honored to be awarded the Innovation Impact Grant by Expo Live, an innovation and partnership grant program launched by Expo 2020 Dubai, in support of sustainable social business solutions worldwide. The “Global Innovator” grants were awarded to solutions working in 76 countries around the globe and the awardees are now having the opportunity to participate in the Live Programming happening at the Expo in Dubai from October 2021 to March 2022. The event was originally scheduled to kick off last year, but was postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After a much anticipated year-long wait, SOIL had the ...
The Challenges of Results-Based Financing for Sanitation: Shared Lessons Learned from Haiti
SOIL is proud to offer the most cost-effective, safe sanitation intervention in Haiti, costing less than pit latrines, septic tanks, and sewers per household basis per year. Our years of work building out a service in Haiti proves that even the world’s most vulnerable populations are willing to pay for safely managed sanitation and value the public health benefits of having this service. Yet, we also recognize that vulnerable households are unable- and further, should not have to - take on the national burden of financing this public good and basic human right.
Over the past few years, SOIL has been working alongside the Haitian sanitation ...
Building Resilience: SOIL at World Water Week 2021
According to FAO, 2 billion people around the world live in areas plagued by physical water scarcity and another 1.6 billion face water scarcity due to a lack of the necessary infrastructure to bring water into their communities. As a result of the impacts of global climate change, the crisis is only anticipated to worsen. Half of the world is expected to be living in high-stress water areas by 2030. We see this reality every day in the communities in Haiti where SOIL works: water is expensive, hard to come by, and so often unsafe to drink. The lack of water resources and infrastructure have far reaching impacts on public health and also ...
SOIL Mentioned on NPR’s Fresh Air Podcast
Photo courtesy of Ricardo Venegas
The SOIL team works extremely hard to provide safe and dignified sanitation to the communities we serve and build a more resilient future in Haiti. We’re also committed to spreading the word about the global sanitation crisis and love to see our work featured in different mediums around the world. Recently, Chelsea Wald was interviewed on NPR Podcast, Fresh Air, where she discussed her book, Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet, which debuted on April 6th. Pipe Dreams explores the incredible work that is being done in the sector to innovate more efficient sanitation infrastructure, and ...
SOIL Participates in First-Ever National Interscholastic Puzzle Competition in Haiti
SOIL's mobile toilets at the event in Cap-Haitien.
The SOIL team loves to be a part of a problem-solving mission. However, we were introduced to an entirely new puzzling experience earlier this month with the first ever National Interscholastic Puzzle Competition in Cap-Haitien! Alas, they would not let us compete, because they said we were too old, but we did get to provide the sanitation facilities! SOIL has recently started renting out mobile toilets at local events around Cap-Haitien as a new way to diversify our revenue stream and provide much needed on-site sanitation to these events. As we previously highlighted in May, SOIL’s EkoLakay ...