SOIL

A complete lack of sewers in Haiti fuels the interrelated crises of waterborne disease and environmental degradation. With less than 1% of human waste safely treated, Haiti has the lowest rates of access to improved sanitation infrastructure in the western hemisphere. SOIL’s container-based sanitation service in Haiti provides households in urban and peri-urban communities with affordable in-home toilets and weekly waste collection. The human waste, and potential environmental and public health threat, is safely removed from densely-populated communities and treated and transformed into agriculture-grade compost at our own waste treatment facility. The compost end-product is sold and used to bolster Haiti’s badly depleted soils, improving soil water retention, productivity, and food security.  

The world needs a model for basic sanitation provision in urban communities without sewers that reimagines waste as an ecological resource, provides a life-saving service to underserved populations, and is designed to be resilient in a changing climate.

Only 34% of urban Haitians have access to improved sanitation facilities and less than 1% of human waste is safely treated. Poor sanitation access has resulted in a public health crisis and the country is home to the highest incidence of childhood diarrhea in the world. As nutrients from human wastes contaminate water supplies, Haiti’s once fertile soils are rapidly degrading due to erosion and intensive agriculture. Agricultural production has declined for the past 2 decades resulting in more than 20% of children being malnourished. Haiti is also ranked 3rd in the world in 2021 for risks related to climate change.  

Poor sanitation and soil erosion are the key factors affecting the health of aquatic ecosystems in Haiti, and this problem is likely to be exacerbated by climate change and increased population pressures. SOIL’s holistic model addresses this problem by ensuring that nutrients from human waste are returned to the soil, harnessing the power of ecological systems to build resilience through simultaneously protecting water resources, reducing waterborne disease, sequestering carbon and revitalizing degraded soils.

SOIL operates a social enterprise, branded EkoLakay, that provides an inclusive and affordable, low-tech, container-based sanitation (CBS) service to vulnerable urban and peri-urban communities in Cap-Haitien, Haiti. EkoLakay has gone from a pilot project in 2013 to a service which today provides nearly 9,000 urban residents with safe and dignified access to household sanitation. For a small monthly fee, EkoLakay provides households with toilets, weekly collection of wastes, and safe treatment and transformation of wastes into agriculture grade compost using ecological processes that respects World Health Organization standards.  

To date, over 500 metric tons of compost have been produced, establishing a circular economy model that also addresses soil erosion and deforestation in Haiti, livelihood opportunities, and climate adaptation - growing resiliency both in Haiti’s urban communities along the coast and in rural agricultural areas where the compost is applied. Revenues from toilet user fees and compost sales support ongoing project costs and showcase the potential to affordably provide household sanitation in water-scarce and resource-poor urban communities through market-based solutions and public private partnership models.

Urban residents without access to safe, hygienic and dignified sanitation. This target population is comprised of families that live in impoverished urban and peri-urban neighborhoods of northern Haiti, where traditional sanitation technologies have proved difficult or impossible to implement. Because of the demonstrated need for improved sanitation interventions in urban communities and the remarkably low costs of providing EkoLakay container-based toilets, beneficiaries include the Base of the Pyramid populations where the majority of people live below the poverty line. Over 80% of EkoLakay’s customers have never had a toilet and the toilet has been designed with dignity, affordability and accessibility in mind. Secondary beneficiaries include farmers who use the compost and people living in environmentally degraded areas where reforestation efforts are underway.  

SOIL is actively engaged with stakeholders at every level of implementation of the solution from the community level to the national sanitation authority. Solutions that meet the needs of the population simply do not work unless they are community driven, designed and supported at all stages of development and implementation. Since SOIL’s start, we’ve worked closely with the communities we serve and the Haitian government to develop a sustainable solution that targets the real, rather than perceived needs of these stakeholders.  

SOIL’s full cycle approach to sanitation combines simple yet innovative technological innovation with a catalytic approach to financing in partnership with donors and the Haitian government which both prioritizes and incentivizes equity, ecological sustainability and inclusivity. We believe that access to dignified sanitation is a fundamental human right and that through ecologically informed ingenuity the sanitation crisis can be addressed in ways that are environmentally restorative, climate-positive and livelihood generating. Our solution seeks to ensure that the right to dignified sanitation can, not only be fully realized in Haiti, but also serve as a model for vulnerable communities globally.

SOIL’s full cycle solution is aligned with this Challenge to address the critical need to provide  the most sustainable and resilience-building innovations in one of the most impoverished and climate-vulnerable countries in the world. Using circular economy principles, SOIL’s container-based sanitation solution is designed to provide a dignified, essential service that creates scalable economic opportunities through local livelihood creation, while protecting ecosystems from the threat of untreated waste contamination and promoting environmental restoration through the recycling of nutrients back to the soil. SOIL’s solution is ecologically accountable across the entire sanitation chain, building local resilience with global replication potential.

SOIL currently provides services to 1,500 households in Cap-Haitien, Haiti representing 9,000 users that previously had no access to safe sanitation. SOIL is operating in 16 service zones in urban and peri-urban Cap-Haitien, and is poised to grow our service to 8,000 households over the next 4 years in partnership with the Haitian government through increasing the household density in service neighborhoods and expanding into new neighborhoods to reach more vulnerable populations without access to safe sanitation.

SOIL’s initiative is one of the most promising tests of the paradigm-shifting hypothesis that sanitation no longer needs to focus on waste disposal, but rather on the ecologically beneficial reuse of human waste. With nature as our inspiration, and alongside beneficiary communities and global research institutions, SOIL designed an innovative sanitation system that simultaneously restores the environment to its life-giving potential, prevents the spread of waterborne disease, creates livelihood opportunities, uses less water and emits less greenhouse gasses than traditional sanitation technologies. SOIL’s solution protects aquatic ecosystems while restoring soil fertility in vulnerable agricultural communities, for increased resiliency against the impacts of climate change.

SOIL’s sanitation service currently provides affordable and safe managed sanitation service to 1,500 households (reaching 9,000 people). Within 12 months, SOIL will reach 15,000 people and within 5 years, SOIL will be albe to reach over 48,000 people (serving 8,000 households).

SOIL uses an extensive data set of key metrics gathered by SOIL’s R&D department and field staff to monitor progress against our strategic goals, KPI's include, but are not limited to:

• Number of toilets installed
• Number of users benefiting from sanitation services
• Quantity of waste treated
• Quantity of compost produced
• Number of staff employed
• Service and compost sales revenue

SOIL currently has 65 full-time staff, 86% of whom are Haitian, with an additional 100+ contract workers each year. Overall SOIL has very low staff turnover and invests significantly in staff capacity.

Although SOIL’s implementation efforts are focused solely in Haiti, SOIL has been recognized as a global thought leader in the sector for our efforts to transparently share lessons learned through peer-reviewed publications and active engagement in sectoral dialogues. We believe that our successes in building EkoLakay, which we first piloted seven years ago, into the growing social business it is today is a result of our commitments to local collaboration, entrepreneurship, and capacity development. For thirteen years, SOIL has been led by Dr. Sasha Kramer and a leadership team with expertise in ecology, business administration, sanitation, public health, engineering, and agronomy. As we prepare to scale our sanitation service, we’re heavily investing in staff capacity development and recruitment efforts to ensure we’re proactive about continuing to build a team that’s ready to grow our impact. 

SOIL has been working in Haiti since 2006 to address the extreme inequalities of lack of access to basic essential services. Over this time the organization, born out of community-driven initiative, has piloted innovative ways to meet the needs of the population and develop a sustainable model for service provision in a fragile state.  SOIL is led by a collaborative Executive management team of 7 directors with specialized skill sets who report to a volunteer Board of Directors made up of members of the community of donors, volunteers, and allies of the organization who display the professional experience, dedication, and responsibility needed to lead SOIL. Eighty seven percent of SOIL’s staff are Haitian and the primary implementors of the day-to-day activities of SOIL’s sanitation service. In order to implement the most appropriate and community-driven solution, SOIL has cultivated a leadership team in Haiti with diverse experience and local knowledge that includes environmental engineering, ecology, sales, marketing, supply chain engineering, operations and human resources.  SOIL’s solution was built using a model of extensive community input and collaboration that values addressing real needs versus perceived needs of the communities where we work.

SOIL is inspired by the bold and innovative spirit of the Solve community and sees great potential in being able to further refine and expand our innovative solutions to the global urban sanitation crisis alongside Solve and its partners. Beyond benefiting from collaboration with Solve members, SOIL hopes to leverage the financial support from Solve to expand our regenerative, circular sanitation service in Haiti, proving to be an open-source solution that can be scaled and replicated in Haiti and globally.

SOIL would benefit greatly from the opportunity to leverage the MIT Solve community's experience particularly with regards to research and technology, expanding our visibility, and seeking funding opportunities.

(1) Interdisciplinary research partners: SOIL works at the nexus of sustainable development, public health, engineering, social entrepreneurship, and resilience, and we seek interdisciplinary long-term research collaborations that can support our efforts to scale sanitation services in vulnerable urban communities in Haiti and to disseminate learnings from this work to replicators globally.

(2) Logistics and tech experts: We are excited that Solve’s community of members includes a wide range of innovative companies as we are looking to learn from others as we improve our logistics and bring new tech solutions to reduce our costs and increase our impact.

(3) Funding organizations: SOIL’s upfront capital expenses, unmet operational costs while we scale, and research and development are funded by prize funds, foundations, and individual donors. Introductions from Solve can play an important role in expanding SOIL’s impact in Haiti.

SOIL’s circular-economy approach to sanitation and ecosystem resilience aligns well with the criteria for the GM Prize by supporting communities in shifting towards a more circular economy through zero waste and zero carbon. SOIL will use prize funds from the GM Prize to expand composting waste treatment services, safely transforming an increased amount of human waste into rich, agricultural-grade compost to support soil restoration, agricultural production, reforestation, and climate resiliency. In addition, GM Prize funds will be used to support SOIL’s ongoing research into the positive climate impact of sanitation services, further making the case for climate financing for sanitation scale-up.

Lack of access to sanitation services has a disproportionately negative effect on women and girls, as they are more vulnerable to violence when seeking a place to defecate and they are the primary caregivers for relatives sickened by waterborne disease. Especially for nighttime use, a private household toilet is a significant improvement from a shared or public option, particularly for women and girls. SOIL and Stanford University found in a 2013 study that prior to having a SOIL toilet, only 30% of our customers reported feeling safe from physical or sexual assault when using their primary sanitation option; that share increased to 91% after a SOIL toilet was installed. In a recent survey of SOIL’s customers, an astonishing 97% of clients shared that their personal security improved after joining the service. SOIL will use funds from the Innovation for Women Prize to increase the number of women and girls accessing our in-home sanitation service and to support the replication of household sanitation services globally through research and information-sharing.

SOIL’s circular-economy approach to sanitation meets the criteria for The ServiceNow Prize by supporting communities in shifting towards a more circular economy through zero waste and zero carbon. SOIL will use prize funds to expand composting waste treatment services, safely transforming an increased amount of human waste into rich, agricultural-grade compost to support increased carbon sequestration, soil restoration, agricultural production, reforestation, and climate resiliency. In addition, The ServiceNow Prize funds would be used to support SOIL’s ongoing research into the positive climate impact of sanitation services and the benefits of composting waste treatment in low-resource communities for increased food production.