Welcoming Maya Lubeck-Schricker as SOIL's Research Director
SOIL Research team (Maya Lubeck-Schricker, Bridj Ozeris and Miselie Fanor-Pierre) posing on picture day in Haiti.
We are beyond excited to welcome Maya Lubeck-Schricker back to the SOIL team—this time as our Director of Research and Innovation.
Maya’s journey with SOIL began in 2020, right after she finished up her undergraduate degree in Community Health at Tufts University. While scoping out different post-grad job opportunities, Maya found a mutual connection to SOIL through the wonderful Jess Laporte (also involved with SOIL’s Research at the time) and applied for the job of SOIL Research Associate. Needless to say, it was a great fit, and despite the challenges of starting this role during the early months of COVID-19, Maya quickly adapted to the work and became a cherished member of our team.
“Because of COVID chaos, I started working with SOIL remotely for a year and a half,” Maya recalls. “I was learning a lot, and congruently, that continued to generate questions I was eager to answer with an in-person visit.”
Eventually, Maya was able to unite with the rest of the research team during a one-week visit to Cap-Haïtien. Three months later, Maya moved to Cap-Haïtien, where she spent a year immersing herself in the work and learning how to speak Kreyol amongst the team.
Then, in late 2022, as civil unrest in Haiti escalated, Maya returned to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree in Epidemiology, sharpening her skills in statistical design and data analysis.
”I felt that I had become the go-to person at SOIL for experimental design and statistics. I taught myself a lot of things through hands-on learning but I was starting to feel a little out of my depth with bigger requests. Now, with my skillsets built up, I am lucky enough to bring them back with me as I step into this new role.”
What are some of the primary goals that you have for yourself and the Research team?
A top priority of mine is the capacity strengthening of our team. We have two incredible SOIL Research Associates, Bridj Ozeris and Miselie Fanor-Pierre. They are strong researchers with excellent data collection skills, and they’re eager to deepen their expertise in managing, cleaning, and analyzing data. I am excited to work together to identify and tell compelling stories with our data.
The other priority is getting back to operational requests from our team. While preparing for our Results-Based Financing initiative with IDB Lab, we had to put a pause on some of the requests from our operations team to focus on large-scale household surveys. Now that those projects are wrapping up we can return our attention to requests from our operations, rather than external partners. For example, a recent request that came in from the operations team to study the sources of household waste entering our site and explore potential interventions. Now that we have more bandwidth, we can take stock of needs like these and dive into them.
And finally, in the medium-to-long-term I want to design and support additional studies to contribute to sectoral knowledge building. These are the big ticket items like health impact studies that analyze how EkoLakay is tied to improved health outcomes. One area I’d also love to explore is intra-household dynamics—understanding if members within a household have equal access to sanitation and a dignified quality of life. Those types of studies require careful design and years of commitment, but they can provide insights that guide the sanitation sector forward as a whole.
How would you define sanitation?
To me, sanitation is a system that takes away your waste without you needing to worry about it. And preferably that ‘place’ is a safely managed waste treatment system.
Because my background is in public health, I’ve always thought about sanitation as a foundation for community health. But over the years I’ve realized it’s about so much more than that—it’s also about dignity, economic resilience, and overall quality of life. Sanitation underpins so many other indicators of well-being. It’s been a fun journey learning about all of these different perspectives and how we can leverage each one to aid the cause of expanding access to sanitation for all.
Why Sanitation? Why WASH?
I have always been drawn to WASH. In high school I took a class on global water conflicts that was a series of case studies on water crises, and each month we would propose solutions. Then, in undergrad I worked with Dr. Ramnath Subbaraman on my thesis about water provision and legal status in slums outside of Mumbai. As I was exploring post-grad job opportunities, I came across SOIL Haiti and thought sanitation was close enough to my interests in water.
Now, I’m completely hooked on sanitation—and honestly, the deeper I dive into this sector, the more disconcerting it feels to see how much more of the available WASH funding goes to water over sanitation.
Safe sanitation is a precursor to safe water.
If you don’t have proper sanitation your water supply is likely going to be dirty. Prioritizing safe sanitation as the initial intervention represents an upstream strategy for strengthening community health outcomes.
Another striking observation is that, in most contexts, water is regarded as a public good and therefore a collective responsibility, while sanitation is often framed as an individual matter and frequently excluded from broader policy discussions. Yet in practice, sanitation is inherently communal: the practices of a single household directly affect the health and well-being of surrounding households, whereas water use at the household level does not necessarily produce the same neighborhood-wide impacts. I could talk about this for much longer, but maybe that’s a discussion for another time.
What is the impact that you see SOIL is having and why do you feel that is important?
When I first came to Haiti, my biggest question was about the acceptability of our toilets: Do people actually want them? Are there complaints? Do we have to work hard to generate demand? Coming from an academic background and having studied sanitation systems in other contexts, I was especially curious about what people would be willing to accept—and pay for—in terms of a toilet.
I was surprised by the consistency of the answer to that question, which was always that the demand for SOIL’s dry toilets was not a notable concern. The primary concern is actually about meeting demand. How to expand access to as many new neighborhoods as possible—as quickly as possible.
To know that SOIL is offering a customer-preferred option that is extremely well-adapted to the environment of Cap-Haitien (densely populated neighborhoods, extreme flooding, inconsistent weather patterns, etc.) motivates me to continue pushing this solution forward.
Where do you hope to see Haiti in the next ten years?
The government contract that SOIL is close to signing as the first public-private partnership for basic services in Haiti is inspiring—it shows that the will to provide basic services exists, even if the logistical and financial barriers are daunting. I see SOIL’s EkoLakay service as a model for other basic service provision initiatives across the country. The demand exists, and the political will is present.
Anyone who is thoughtful about their positionality in the international development space will ask themselves: What am I doing here? As long as you can answer that question honestly—and know that you, your colleagues, and the government are united around a common and worthy goal—you can move forward with clarity and confidence. I would almost dare to say that SOIL’s been lucky to get to this point, but it’s not luck. Our team has put decades of work into getting this service to where it is today. I, on the other hand, feel very lucky to be part of that effort, and I’m committed to doing everything I can to help it continue to grow.
Any fun facts for SOIL supporters to know about you?
Let’s see… I tried really hard to figure out how to get out and surf in Cap-Haitien. Did not work out. I couldn’t find any surfable boards. I tried to import one from the DR, which also fell through.
Not to mention the sharp reefs and frequently polluted water adds difficulty (another consequence of the lack of safe sanitation and sewage being sent out to the ocean). I got to the point where I even brought a board leash down to Cap, determined that I was going to get a surfboard and just make it work somehow, but to this day it remains an outstanding challenge.
Perhaps once citywide inclusive sanitation is achieved, the water will be less dangerous to swim in and we can start up a surfing scene in Cap-Haitien! Reason number 1001 for safe sanitation access.
Thank you, Maya, for sharing your journey with SOIL and your vision for this new role. We’re excited to collaborate with you and the Research and Innovation team, and we look forward to the insights, discoveries, and innovations that will emerge in the year ahead.