31 results for tag: toilets
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 ...
Making the Invisible Visible with CBSA’s Rémi Kaupp
Rémi Kaupp, Executive Director of the Container Based Sanitation Alliance
Imagine not having a toilet. It’s a situation that we’ve asked you, our readers and supporters, to think about from time to time, and this week, with World Toilet Day just around the corner, we are asking you to take a closer look at what living without a toilet means for people around the world. And to help us think more deeply about some of the specifics and possible solutions, we spoke with Rémi Kaupp, Friend of SOIL and the Executive Director of the Container Based Sanitation Alliance (CBSA) about perceptions of poop, the role that the public sector ...
Back to the Basics: An Overview of SOIL’s Essential Service
Readers of our blog might know that SOIL provides EkoLakay sanitation services to households in the city of Cap-Haïtien on Haiti’s northern coast and that we are currently providing this essential service to nearly 2,000 households, impacting over 11,000 individuals. This past year alone, our sanitation and composting staff collected and treated over 500 metric tons of waste from the communities we serve and produced 170 metric tons of compost through our ecological waste treatment process. But do you know how the service works? For new potential household customers, the EkoLakay journey begins when an individual expresses interest in ...
Client Story: Meet Augulia Cemeran
SOIL client, Augulia Cemeran at 2020 World Toilet Day event.
If you’re one of the 3.3 million people living in urban Haiti who does not have a toilet, you have very few options available to you. Haitian cities, like many rapidly growing urban areas globally, have no sewer system. Flush toilets are expensive and mostly unaffordable for impoverished households in that they require a costly septic tank, a steady supply of water, and are not always suitable for high water table areas. A more common option, pit latrines, are also expensive to construct, susceptible to flooding, and do not safely treat waste . To bridge the gap in accessible sanitation ...
All Together to Make it Happen
Nadege Fucien is a mother and an entrepreneur. She is raising her growing family alongside Haiti’s northern coast in a neighborhood of Cap-Haïtien called Avyasyon. Like many of her neighbors, Nadege joined SOIL’s sanitation service, EkoLakay, to have a safe, clean place for her family to go to the bathroom. During our weekly EkoLakay collection run last week, our team took a break to sit and chat together to get to know her a little more. Meet Nadege One of the reasons that Nadege decided first to sign up to have a SOIL toilet in her home was the affordability of the service. Compared to other available sanitation solutions, SOIL’s was ...
Showcasing Possibility at COP24
Earlier this month, SOIL was honored to receive the United Nations' Momentum for Change Award in Planetary Health at COP24 in Katowice, Poland. Momentum for Change honors innovative and transformative solutions that address both climate change and wider economic, social and environmental challenges. Recognized as a Lighthouse Activity, SOIL’s work is honored for being a practical, scalable and replicable example of a groundbreaking intervention to tackle climate change. Check out this video showcasing the Planetary Health award winners (narrated by Sir David Attenborough!): Planetary Health: Narrated Sir David Attenborough from Momentum ...
Four Reasons to Love your Toilet
Photo: Vic Hinterlang
We’re writing you from Haiti, where this morning SOIL’s waste collection teams have been out in our communities since six o’clock, despite protests and strikes disrupting movement throughout cities across the country. SOIL’s sanitation heroes are committed to providing access to life-saving sanitation services – rain or shine. And today, with services around the country on hold, EkoLakay continues to operate so that families have uninterrupted access to their toilets. Each day we see firsthand the urgent necessity of toilets in the communities we serve, and in the world at large. For the fifth annual World Toilet ...
Is There Demand for a Better Toilet?
Photo: Vic Hinterlang
We know the global sanitation system is broken. Around the world nearly 2.5 billion people lack access to a toilet of any kind and even more than that lack access to a toilet that ensures safe waste treatment. Over the past 4 years SOIL has made in-home toilets accessible to households in Haiti through our EkoLakay toilet service. What we didn’t know, and have been trying to discover, was how much people are willing to pay for a household toilet. As SOIL set out to see if we could answer that question and explore new markets for EkoLakay in Port-au-Prince, we discovered some unexpected trends in sanitation satisfaction and ...
SOIL Partners with St. Barnabas Agricultural College
St. Barnabas Agricultural College (CASB) is an institution with a vision to provide sustainable agricultural services to Haiti’s Northern region, and the school is using both SOIL’s EkoMobil mobile toilets and compost, Konpòs Lakay, to help achieve that goal! The two-year agriculture technician program is expanding: they are currently constructing new academic facilities and bringing unused plots of land back into agricultural production. The school hopes to have irrigated orchards and crops, aquaponics, an animal husbandry facility, and community gardens where CASB students and neighbors will be able to grow their own food and sell what they ...