Future Projects

What's next for International Action?

We are expanding our efforts to the South-East Department (Sud-Est Département) of Haiti, which is centered around the city of Jacmel. The Director of Health for the South-East Department called Jacmel and the region "the zone most touched by the cholera epidemic."

Since the October 2010 cholera outbreak, 22% of the reported cholera cases in Jacmel have been fatal.

The South-East Department is home to over 500,000 Haitians. We have received help requests from 54 South-East Department schools — schools without a safe way to store or treat water — and many requests from community leaders all throughout the region. The requests originated from the following cities:

• Jacmel – 40,000 inhabitants
• Cayes-Jacmel – 21,374 inhabitants
• Bainet – 62,300 inhabitants
• Marigot – 50,734 inhabitants
• Belle-Anse – 51,707 inhabitants.
• Grand-Gosier – 10,852 inhabitants.

Total population: 236,967

We will install water tanks and chlorination systems at all of the schools (the majority of which are in Jacmel) that have asked us for help. Moreover, we intend to install 20 chlorinators at public water stations throughout the department.

Our goals are to:

1. Improve the health of the South-East Department residents;
2. Train Community Hygiene Promoters (CHPs) to educate children and adults about the importance of clean water;
3. Increase community participation in neighborhood development; and
4. Improve school attendance.

How will this program be different?

The primary goal, and biggest challenge, of our programs is 100% community-control and sustainability. While our projects have been designed with this in mind, we continue to look for areas of improvement. With this in mind, our South-East Department projects will incorporate two new initiatives: Community Hygiene Promoters (CHPs) and a test run of a partnership with the group Ramase Lajan and their plastic recycling franchise program.

Community Hygiene Promoters

The CHPs will be elected representatives of their neighborhoods and will be responsible for educating the community about water, maintaining the community water systems, and completing chlorine residual surveys. They will receive a stipend in return for:

• Using a Hach Chlorine Test Kit to monitor residual chlorine levels at the schools and conduct randomized testing of households in communities with access to a chlorinator;
• Referring residents to nearby water stations with chlorinators while explaining what the chlorinator does and the value of clean water;
• Educating the community about sound at-home hygiene practices;
• Distributing de-worming pills;
• Working with the local water station staff to purchase more chlorine tablets by using some of the revenue from the local water tank; and
• Conducting surveys with heads of households in their community three times each year and recording the GPS coordinates of the households with a Garmin eTrex GPS handheld device.

We have created a 33-question survey that includes questions on topics such as household demographics, water source and toilet type, treatment practices and perceptions, and diarrheal incidence within the household. Each CHP is responsible for 60 surveys during each surveying batch.

Learn more about CHP training and their role in the South-East Department.

Recycling Franchise Program

We have started a partnership with the Ramase Lajan project in Haiti to finance each water station with community earned money. The program will not only reduce the amount of plastic pollution in the cities of Hait, but also nearly double the daily wage earned for hundreds of Haitians – the average wage in Haiti is 200 gourds a day, and people who fully participate in the recycling program will earn, on average, 400 gourds a day.

There are about 1,500 tons of plastic thrown away in Haiti each month (in streets and streams). For many Haitians without steady jobs, collecting plastic is one of the only ways to earn money. However, the only plastic refinery in Haiti is in Port-au-Prince, making it very difficult for people without transportation to collect money for the plastic. Ramase Lajan addresses this issue by working with groups like International Action to identify Haitians to set up and run a recycling franchise anywhere in the country. The process is simple:

1. Residents collect plastic and deliver it to their local recycling franchise, which is completely owned by a Haitian from the community and employs at least four Haitian workers.
2. The owners of the franchise pay the same rate paid out by the Port-au-Prince recycling refinery.
3. The recycling franchise transports the plastic to the central recycling refinery in Port-au-Prince. The franchise owners are paid for the plastic and receive a fixed amount of money for making the trip.

International Action will sponsor the start-up costs of a recycling franchise for an engaged community member that retrieves water from one of our water sites and agrees to buy chlorine tablets and water for the local water station with profits from the nearby recycling center. Thus, the water station becomes self-sufficient and completely run by the Haitian community.