104 results for tag: sanitation
Women in the World: "Saving Lives with Smart Toilets in Haiti"
Published January 9, 2013 for the Women in the World Foundation. By Sam Ritholtz The third anniversary of the cataclysmic Haiti earthquake—a monster that registered 7.0 on the Richter scale, killed 300,000 people and displaced more than 1 million—is coming up on January 12 and with it will come a fresh slew of media stories about the miserable state of Haiti today and its failed reconstruction efforts. That makes Sasha Kramer mad. "People around the world will be throwing up their hands and saying, ‘Haiti again! Will they ever get their lives together!’' says Dr. Kramer (pictured above), an ecologist and head of a Port-au-Prince-based ...
Send Nick to Durban!
Help us send SOIL’s Deputy Director to Durban, South Africa! Nick Preneta has been invited to present on SOIL’s behalf at the Faecal Sludge Management Conference later this month. This is a fantastic opportunity to continue spreading the word about SOIL’s unique and effective utilization of EcoSan technology to provide essential services throughout Haiti, simultaneously combatting two of the country’s worst problems: lack of sanitation and environmental degradation. Additionally, the conference is a unique chance for SOIL to plug in to a primarily research-focused community, helping move us towards our goal of conducting more research and ...
Transforming Twitye
SOIL's Port-au-Prince composting site at Twitye is undergoing a complete transformation. It's a makeover, SOIL style! Given SOIL's mission to transform wastes into resources, the team decided that our site at Twitye, the infamous Port-au-Prince dump, provided an ideal opportunity to take that mission one step further. The Port-au-Prince dump has been a symbol of waste, poverty, and hopelessness for over 25 years. Today, the SOIL team is working to transform the small piece of Twitye housing our compost site into a beautiful, healthy piece of land, showcasing the possibility and the power of transformation. Here's how we're doing it! We're streaml...
Press Release: Cell Phone Powered Poop Tracking Advances Haiti Waste Treatment
The SOIL team is going high tech, using smart phones to streamline poop collection and compost production. Our friends and collaborators from re.source have helped develop a system for SOIL, using an open source data collection platform called Open Data Kit, to record and track all of the composting and collection data from their phones. This technology will help SOIL streamline waste collection and cut down on errors. This is a critical development in SOIL and re.source's new initiative to design and implement a social business model for providing household sanitation. In the coming months we'll begin installing private household toilets throughout ...
Engineering for Change: "Five questions with Sasha Kramer"
Written by Rob Goodier for Engineering for Change on July 8, 2012 Sasha Kramer's enthusiasm for recycling poop is contagious. After hearing from her, it's not hard to imagine the need to give your indoor bathroom a Stone-Age rennovation. She developed EcoSan latrines that store human waste in removable 15-gallon drums for composting. Toilets that transform waste into compost are the key to healthy soils and sustainable living, Kramer says. In that case, maybe everyone's toilet should be a modified pit latrine?
Another key to sustainability is sanitation itself. Kramer promotes both, taking her message of back-end recycling (get it?) to camps and ...
Yon pelerinaj Asenisman mennen yon nouvèl dekouvèt nan listwa / Travel brings new discoveries in history
This is one story from a multi-part series on SOIL's adventures in Africa. English version below Mwen te vwayaje pandan twa jou tout lannwit poum te rive nan peyi benin dafrik e mwen te pase plizyè peyi tankou panama, kiba, lespay, mawòk, togo jis mwen te rive nan bout tè peyi benin dafrik. Objektif pwensipal vizit sa nan benin dafrik se te pou yon pataj eksperyans nan domenn sanitasyon ekolojik ak yon oganizasyon beninwaz ki rele ADESCA ki chita nan komin kalale nan benen e rive travay ak oganizasyon fanm nan 2 vilaj anndan kalale se : Besasi ak Dounkasa ki se 2 kominote riral. Denpi lè mwen te rive nan ayewopò Mawomèd 5 nan Mawòk mwen te ...
SOIL celebrates World Hand Washing Day in Shada
A special post from SOIL Board Member Jessica Lozier On Saturday October 15th, the SOIL team joined hands with the community of Shada to celebrate Universal Hand-Washing Day, a neighborhood where SOIL has worked for years. Children and adults alike participated in the community celebration which included hand-washing demonstrations, the distribution of important sanitation information, and entertaining skits and songs performed by local community groups. Of course no Haitian celebration would be complete without music, and the DJ had the crowd dancing and singing along with the performers and presenters. SOIL’s favorite beneficiaries, ...
Onearth: Preventing Cholera’s Spread in Earthquake-Ravaged Haiti
By Genevra Pittman, Onearth Magazine, November 18, 2010 When Haiti’s cholera outbreak hit tent camps around Port-au-Prince in early November, Sasha Kramer was ready. Kramer is the executive director of SOIL (Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods), an organization she co-founded in 2006. SOIL’s mission is to turn human waste in impoverished Haitian communities into fertilizer for agriculture -- improving public health and empowering people. She was working in Haiti even before the January 2009 quake. After the disaster, Oxfam asked her group to build toilets for displaced residents now living in tents. (See "The Virtues of Human ...
SOIL Stays Vigilant as News Breaks That Cholera Has Reached Port-au-Prince
The worst case scenario has happened - cholera has arrived in Port-au-Prince - and SOIL is continuing to do everything possible to limit the spread of the disease, to provide safe sanitation services, and to keep people informed on the best methods to prevent and treat it. SOIL's "Ajan Prevansyon" / Cholera Prevention Agents, having gone to every tent in every camp where SOIL works, are beginning to spread out to reach communities where information on the prevention and treatment of cholera has not yet been disseminated. Sadly, this is not a short term problem. The Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) says it expects tens of thousands more to ...
Tropical Storm Tomas Passes By But The Sanitation Crisis Continues
It is cool and cloudy in Haiti this morning, and we've gotten reports that Tropical Storm Tomas has mostly blown by. SOIL's agronomist, Jean Marie Noel, is on his way out to our main compost site to check on the damage, SOIL's deputy director, Nick Preneta, is fielding updates from the camps where we work, and SOIL's executive director, Sasha Kramer, is at her godson's baptism. The city is quiet and calm as people slowly return to their lives and work. Right before the storm came, SOIL met with a writer for the Chrisitian Science Monitor to talk about the need to address the ongoing sanitation crisis even as Haiti faces ongoing natural disasters. ...