Climate Action Haiti Project #17180

Support Sustainable Agriculture in Haiti

by SOIL

Project Report | Dec 6, 2018
Kickstarting student gardens with SOIL compost

By Julie Jeliazovski | Project Advisor

The compost that SOIL produces through our urban ecological sanitation service is a safe and organic, agricultural-grade soil amendment that restores the health of soils and helps Haiti’s farmers produce more food. It also, as of recently, helping students in schools across the country learn how to garden.

The Haitian Ministry of Education (MENFP) has begun actively promoting agriculture across the country’s schools, by asking that each of them has at least one standard garden maintained by staff, students, and parents alike. And guess what? They’re using SOIL’s compost in the educational gardens!

The MENFP is hoping to introduce students to plant and animal production while encouraging the spirit of entrepreneurship. The project aims to improve food security in the country by increasing the supply of fresh food to school cafeterias, but also by empowering the younger generation to have the tools they need to know how to grow their own food. By involving not just the students but also their families and the school staff, they hope to expand the program’s impact as well as the potential future technical innovations in the agricultural sector.

To launch the project, last month the MENFP bought almost three metric tons of SOIL’s Konpòs Lakay compost, which was distributed in a number of schools across Haiti. SOIL’s compost has shown incredible benefits to plant growth and soil quality, so we’re excited about its potential to kickstart healthy and productive gardens.

Happy gardening, students!

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Oct 27, 2016
SOIL Agricultural Program Update

By Leah Page | Development Director

Research trials of vetiver - an essential oil

Over the years SOIL's agricultural program has improved the way we use SOIL's EcoSan compost, and helped us provide better information to farmer's looking to increase their yields by incorporating sustainable farming practices. In 2015 - 2016 alone, SOIL trained 10 agricultural interns in the use SOIL's compost for increasing crop yields and we conducted sustainable farming experiments on market crops such as Moringa, hot peppers, cucumbers, onions, lima beans, plantains, cabbage, vetiver, soybeans, watermelons, tomatos, and peanuts.

SOIL is now transitioning towards an exciting new approach to our compost analysis work. Building off of our previous agricultural research, we will be focusing our efforts specifically on partners in the agricultural sector who can work with SOIL to examine the benefits of our compost on high value crops. By no longer conducting research directly at SOIL, we will free up staff time to support efforts that get results to farmers more quickly and we can devote more resources to our composting waste treatment sites, where we produce all this compost in the first place!

You can learn more about our efforts to increase waste treatment services and compost production in Haiti at SOIL's Global Giving project "Generating Organic Compost for Farmers". And we also invite you to join our email list at www.oursoil.org, friend us on social media @SOILHaiti, and email us anyway at donations@oursoil.org.

There’s a Haitian proverb that says, “Sa ou plante, se li ou rekolte.” / What you plant is what you’ll harvest. Thank you for planting the seeds of change in Haiti.

Analyzing the results of a pepper harvest

Research trials of moringa grown in SOIL compost

Links:

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Aug 22, 2016
SOIL Represents at Conference in Kumasi

By Claire Remington | Project Coordinator

Last week I had the great honor and pleasure of participating in and presenting at the Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) International Conference, hosted on the Kwame Nkrumah University Science and Technology campus in Kumasi, Ghana. The theme of this year’s conference was Ensuring Availability and Sustainable Management of Water and Sanitation for All.

The conference featured many presentations covering topics like fecal sludge management, resource recovery, and sanitation marketing, and was an incredibly valuable opportunity to gain exposure to international research and best practices in SOIL’s sector of work.

In addition, a few months ago, WEDC invited SOIL to present a paper discussing our research and progress in developing EkoLakay as a working social business model for the provision of household sanitation. The paper outlined the EkoLakay toilet and service, including preliminary cost estimates and a review of the iterations and improvements SOIL has made to the service over time. (And you can find the full paper online here if you want to!)

There was a large and engaged audience for my presentation of SOIL’s EkoLakay service, and interest from the group was so high that the discussion period was extended for an extra twenty minutes! Throughout the conference I also had the opportunity to meet with several groups working around the world who are interested in replicating EkoLakay or creating a similar service.

While in Kumasi, I enjoyed not only the intense learning of the conference environment, but also exploring the city in my down time. I had the opportunity to see a municipal landfill and waste treatment lagoon, use one of Ghana’s many pay-per-use public toilets at the Kumasi central market, and visit the Clean Team headquarters.

Clean Team is a Ghanian company that is developing a service VERY similar to EkoLakay – they even have a fleet of 3-wheel motorcycles for bucket collection like we do! I presented SOIL’s work at their office, and we had the opportunity to compare our two models.

The WEDC conference provided a valuable platform for continuing and improved collaboration and information sharing within the sanitation sector – an important component in our shared work and vision to achieve sustainable management of sanitation – in Ghana and Haiti and throughout the world!

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