EkoLakay

Growing Resilience in Frontline Urban Communities in Haiti with a Cost-Effective Ecological Sanitation Service

An estimated 700 million people living in urban communities globally lack access to sanitation due to the lack of suitable, affordable sanitation infrastructure and service delivery models. As a direct result of lack of access to sanitation, diarrhea kills 2,195 children every day—more than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. While coastal ecosystems become increasingly polluted with nutrients from human waste, the earth’s soil nutrients have been rapidly declining due to erosion and intensive agricultural practices, leading to increased vulnerability to climate change. 

Nowhere is the cycle of poor sanitation, environmental degradation, and poverty more evident than in Haiti, where about 75% of the population lacks access to a sanitary toilet, soil fertility has declined precipitously in the last decades, mountainsides have been deforested, and 36.6 million mega tons of soil are lost to erosion annually. Haiti frequently is ranked at one of the most climate-vulnerable nations in the world. Without innovation, this problem will only get worse: urban populations are projected to increase dramatically in the coming years, with much of that growth concentrated in informal settlements and locations that are highly vulnerable to flooding and climate change impacts.

SOIL seeks to address this challenge in coastal communities in Haiti by proving that it is possible to sustainably provide affordable and dignified household sanitation services even in the world’s most vulnerable and under-resourced urban communities.

 SOIL’s flagship social business, EkoLakay, is a vertically integrated service that provides desirable and affordable container-based sanitation (CBS) services in coastal communities in Haiti. EkoLakay has gone from a pilot project in 2013 to a service which today provides nearly 6,500 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 compost using a process that respects World Health Organization standards. To date, over 250 metric tons of compost have been produced, establishing a circular economy model that also addresses soil erosion and deforestation in Haiti, growing resiliency both in Haiti’s urban communities along the coast and throughout the country at large. 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 that include a combination of private sector revenues and innovative public financing. 

SOIL is beginning a three-year project to expand the SOIL customer base from the 1,000 households it serves today to over 3,000 households (18,000 people) and develop a strong social enterprise on a clear pathway to scale through improved operational performance and new financing instruments developed in partnership with multilateral financing institutions and the Haitian government. In the long term, we believe that SOIL is poised to revolutionize the global approach to sanitation provision, proving a scalable and replicable model with the potential to provide sanitation access for the millions of people living in urban communities globally who currently lack.

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 coastal communities, increasing soil carbon sequestration.

Since 2006, SOIL has designed, tested, and refined sanitation technologies that are uniquely suited to rapidly expanding urban settlements in coastal communities. In contrast to conventional sewage systems, which are non-existent in Haiti and unlikely to be the prevailing paradigm even in the long-term, the CBS toilets SOIL created have a lower capital burden, require less water and energy to operate, and require no infrastructure. Additionally, the technology has been intentionally designed to be natural disaster resilient, making them more practical and safer for coastal communities with high groundwater tables and increasing risk for flooding events. 

Over the next 12 months, SOIL plans to double our household toilet service from the 1,000 households served today to 2,000 households served by July 2019. We will also continue to work to reduce costs and increase revenues by making strategic improvements to our service and simultaneously documenting lessons learned to facilitate the replication of SOIL’s climate-positive sanitation technologies across frontline communities worldwide.

By focusing on developing a sustainable financial model, strengthening EkoLakay’s business model, and concentrating on a density-based expansion plan, SOIL has created an ambitious and achievable pathway to scale our CBS toilet and ecological waste treatment services in Haiti in the coming three to five years. By 2025,SOIL aims to directly reach 60,000 people in urban communities along Haiti’s coastlines with cost-effective, climate-smart sanitation solutions in addition to supporting replication by other implementers around Haiti and globally. 

There is not a comparable urban sanitation solution in Haiti. In the market SOIL serves with EkoLakay, open defecation, “flying toilets” (plastic bags), public toilets, and private or shared latrines are most commonly used. A recent survey showed that 87% of SOIL’s clients did not have a toilet prior to signing up for the service.

By offering a low-cost, effective sanitation option, we believe EkoLakay makes the consumer’s desire to protect their health and environment accessible. And to date, our experience has backed this up: demand for EkoLakay continues to outpace our ability to install toilets despite minimal marketing investments. 

SOIL markets the EkoLakay household toilet service to people living in and around the densely-populated coastal communities that we currently reach with the service. By increasing the density of our service we’re able to achieve better sanitation coverage in target communities while also reducing our collection and logistics costs. Customers who are interested in the service prepay for the first month of service in order to have a toilet installed in their home. Customers then receive weekly waste collection and treatment services, a regular supply of carbon cover material for “flushing” their toilets, and any needed toilet maintenance support.

SOIL will be reaching 12,000 people within 12 months, and 18,000 people within 3 years, with household sanitation services. Over 87% of our customers did not previously have access to a toilet in their home, indicating that EkoLakay has been able to reach households most in need of sanitation solutions. On customer satisfaction surveys, our beneficiaries report improved health, an increased sense of security, and improved quality of life. 

By year 3, SOIL will be producing over 25 metric tons of compost per month, increasing the soil’s ability to absorb water and sequester carbon, improving resiliency in frontline communities.

We believe that our successes in building EkoLakay into the growing social business it is today is a result of our commitments to local collaboration, entrepreneurship, and capacity development. Over 90% of SOIL’s staff are local to the neighborhoods where SOIL works and our staff bring a variety of critical experiences and expertise to the team, including business development, engineering, ecology, public health, and administration. 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 building a team that’s ready to grow our impact.

While SOIL generates revenue from service fees and compost sales, we believe it is unreasonable to expect families living in vulnerable communities to pay the full cost of waste treatment, a public good which is heavily subsidized in wealthier nations. The Haitian government agrees and has expressed eagerness to work with SOIL to develop a public-private partnership (PPP). SOIL is now working with international financial institutions and Haitian government to explore the possibility of piloting a Payments for Results (PfR) mechanism, whereby SOIL is financed for demonstrated results, creating a bridge to a long-term public financing for sanitation service delivery.

SOIL is inspired by the bold and innovative spirit of the Solve community and sees a 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 collaboration with Solve members, SOIL hopes to leverage the financial support from Solve to expand our climate smart sanitation infrastructure along Haiti’s northern coast, increasing our potential to impact more lives and helping us grow resilience to climate change in one of the world’s most climate vulnerable nations. 

Logistics improvements - Our Excel-based data management system became strained as our sanitation service surpassed 500 customers. EkoLakay has since fully transitioned into using a new customer relationship management (CRM) system that utilizes a combination of Salesforce, Taroworks, and GPS data points. We’re now able to easily collect customer data and location using smartphones in the field, and we want to use this information to improve route optimization and service logistics.

Financing – As we work to put in place a blended-revenue model for sustaining services, we seek support to refine our pitch and widen our network of supporters.