BY CHLOE ADCOCK
Chloe Adcock is a second-year International Development student at Johns Hopkins SAIS.
In January 2020, Haiti reached an important milestone – one year free of confirmed cholera cases, and it is now approaching the two-year mark to be declared cholera-free. It is an important public health milestone in a country where nearly 10,000 people died from the disease and 820,000 were sickened. The cholera outbreak in Haiti started from the improper disposal of septage from a United Nations Peacekeepers’ base. The septage from the camp was collected by a formal septage collection company but then disposed of in an open septic pit in a rural area. It is believed that the septic pit, infected with the vibrio cholera bacteria, overflowed into the river down the hill from the pit, triggering the cholera outbreak throughout the Artibonite River delta. One decade on from this tragedy, the majority of fecal sludge in Haiti is still not safely treated and Haiti remains at risk of future disease outbreaks.
Container-based sanitation (CBS) has emerged in the past decade as an innovative sanitation solution in contexts where sewer networks and safely-managed latrines are infeasible or unaffordable. CBS is an “end-to-end” sanitation service wherein providers regularly collect human waste from special toilets that are outfitted with removable, sealable containers and transport the waste to a safe septage or fecal sludge treatment and disposal sites. Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL) is one such CBS provider that has pioneered this sanitation approach in Haiti. SOIL is also a circular economy enterprise, seeking to not just dispose of waste but also recapture value from it through compost sales. This article will present an overview of the Haitian urban sanitation situation, SOIL’s operating model, key successes and long-term challenges.
Urban Sanitation in Haiti
The most recent UNICEF-WHO Joint Monitoring Programme data show that fewer than 1% of Haitians have access to safely managed sanitation. Within urban areas, only 43% of the population has access to basic sanitation, and the open defecation rate is 8%. The open defecation rate is even higher in informal neighborhoods called ‘cités’ and has been estimated to be as high as 40% in some cités around Cap-Haitien. Poorer households tend to use unimproved pit latrines, and an estimated 46% of low-income households in Port-au-Prince use shared facilities.
Fecal sludge emptying is provided by private sector companies that use vacuum trucks, but these companies primarily serve higher-income and commercial clientele. Fecal sludge is also commonly dumped into rural open fields and waterways. Poorer households either never empty their latrine pits, which presents a groundwater contamination risk, or they hire informal latrine pit emptiers called ‘bayakous,’ who work in extremely unsafe and unhygienic conditions.
Many low-income neighborhoods and cités frequently flood, causing traditional latrines to overflow and contaminate the environment. Additionally, the geography and narrow lanes of informal settlements present engineering difficulties and heightened costs for installation of sewers.
SOIL and EkoLakay
In this context, SOIL offers a household CBS service called “EkoLakay” (eco-home) that includes a specially-designed toilet that diverts urine and collects solid waste into a sealable, removable container. The EkoLakay service also includes compost material to cover the waste after each use, weekly collection of the fecal waste, and transportation to SOIL’s treatment and composting facility. The container toilet ensures feces do not contaminate groundwater and can be sealed off in case of flooding. SOIL collects the containers directly from homes and uses neighborhood depots to store waste before bringing it to the treatment and composting facility. This service is provided for $3.20 per toilet, per month. The compost is sold under the name ‘Konpòs Lakay’. As of 2019, EkoLakay had more than 1,000 subscribers. SOIL operates primarily in Cap-Haitien but recently expanded to Port-au-Prince.
Figure 1: The SOIL Sanitation Service Cycle
Source: SOIL
EkoLakay provides an alternative to the large up-front capital expenditure of building latrines and the high costs of latrine emptying by offering a service at a low monthly fee. “Smoothing” these high costs makes EkoLakay more predictable and affordable for poor households. Furthermore, in a country where more than half of all households are renters, few people may be incentivized to invest in the capital expenditure of building an improved latrine in the first place.
SOIL aspires to reach 3,500 customers by the end of 2020 and 60,000 in the long-term. Currently, their model is not financially sustainable. In 2016, the EkoLakay toilet user fees covered 5% of the total costs, or 27% of waste collection and transport, excluding the cost of the waste treatment and composting. Revenues from the compost covered 20-40% of the costs of the composting facility, excluding overhead.
Photo 1: EkoLakay Toilet Models Made of Wood and Ferrocement
Source: SOIL, via World Bank
Measuring the Success of SOIL
SOIL is a long way off from profitability. The management of SOIL believes that user tariffs cannot be raised much while remaining affordable for their low-income customer base. Market studies have shown that the household collection and transport components have the potential to be profitable, and SOIL aspires to spin-off that part of their operation. However, they believe the waste treatment and compost facility will always require subsidization. SOIL views either a public-private partnership with the Haitian government or innovative development financing from donors as the best options for the financial sustainability for their waste treatment and compost facility.
Success can also be measured through customer growth and satisfaction. As of 2017, SOIL had an average customer growth rate of 290 clients per year and a 2.6% rate of attrition. Customer surveys show high satisfaction, with 97% reporting improved personal security, 88% improved quality of life in regards to health, and 90% reporting improved ability to save money.
Considering the public good characteristics of community sanitation, success can also be measured by the amount of safely managed feces that is properly disposed and therefore saved from being dumped into the environment. SOIL reports that 10 metric tons of waste are collected each week. The toilets use no precious water resources, and the SOIL CBS process emits fewer greenhouse gases than traditional sewage treatment and illegal dumping. Therefore, SOIL’s CBS service also contributes to the global public good of climate change mitigation. Furthermore, SOIL’s compost has been used in reforestation initiatives, and restored forests trap atmospheric carbon.
Long-Term Prospects and Conclusion
SOIL’s EkoLakay service successfully addresses many challenges that make traditional sanitation solutions challenging in Haiti. The principal challenges that SOIL will face in the long term are securing sustainable financing and support from the Haitian National Directorate of Water and Sanitation (DINEPA). DINEPA has a policy against the subsidization of household toilets, and government officials have expressed the view of CBS as a transitional solution, which casts their long-term support for CBS in doubt. However, DINEPA has not announced plans for installing a centralized sewer system in Cap-Haitien or Port-au-Prince. Since government fiscal support is unlikely, SOIL will need to concentrate on generating demand for EkoLakay. Additionally, the international donor and philanthropy community should continue to fund SOIL because iterating and optimizing the business model will take time. If SOIL’s model can be refined and made more cost effective, it will be a valuable potential tool for crowded, climate-vulnerable cities facing similar sanitation challenges all over the globe.
Photo 2: Collecting CBS Containers in an Urban Neighborhood
Source: SOIL
COVER PHOTO CREDIT: Free use image from Canva Pro.