Haiti: Fifteen Years After the Earthquake

Earlier this month, January 12, 2025, marked 15 years since the devastating 7.0 earthquake shook Port-au-Prince and its surroundings for an interminable half of a minute, significantly damaging the Presidential Palace, the National Assembly building, and forever altering the trajectory of the tiny island nation. There had been glimpses of positive momentum in Haiti during the months leading up to the quake, evidenced by the convening of a UN Special Envoy intended to jump-start international investment in the country and in the more optimistic tone the media had begun using while reporting on it. 

In addition to breaking buildings and taking more than 300,000 lives, the 2010 earthquake stopped that progression in its tracks, displacing millions of people, creating homelessness in the country’s capital and unleashing a kind of extreme poverty that was specific and new. Which is not to say that all hope was lost, but in the first weeks and months after the quake, it was nearly impossible to think about anything other than alleviating suffering. In the immediate aftermath, SOIL pivoted its attention to addressing urgent humanitarian needs and worked to help provide water and medical transportation for the displaced while launching an intervention that provided emergency ecological sanitation to over 20,000 people in the IDP camps. 

Many years and natural disasters later, Haiti is still struggling to transition from disaster relief to reconstruction and so within that verity, SOIL carries on its daily work at the nexus of emergency response and development. 

“We want to be ambitious about expanding our impact and that will always be our north star,” says Sasha Kramer, SOIL’s co-founder and Executive Director. 

“At the same time, there are moments when the ability to continue providing a service or even just to stay in operation and not close down is a real testament to the courage and the hard work of our team.”

2024 was SOIL’s biggest year of growth to date, despite the reverberations of that enormous fifteen year old tremor that can still be felt today. SOIL’s perseverance all these years is in many ways a tribute to our belief in Haiti’s majesty, in its singularity, in the resplendence we witness in the day to day tenacity of our clients and our staff. 

Haiti’s history of an unrelenting struggle for justice is what makes its people, and our dedicated staff members, mighty. Mighty without material wealth, without natural resources, without electricity, without an elected president.

If sanitation is the soul of SOIL’s work, then Haiti, in whatever its form, is our ever-beating heart. While many aid efforts left the country after the first or fifth or seventh anniversary of the earthquake, SOIL has remained committed to improving and expanding long-lasting sanitation solutions that serve thousands of households in northern Haiti today. SOIL will forever stand in solidarity with the people of Haiti and work towards creating a brighter future, despite the obstacles that we will surely face in years to come.

Thank you for standing with us. We are truly grateful to have a community of passionate advocates and partners like you who empower SOIL to continue to do the essential work of providing safe sanitation and promoting human dignity–-a critical and driving force for change.