We demonstrate, teach and equip Haitian families with
small-scale technologies to help save time and create jobs.

Included as part of the Agricultural Training Center, Love A Child’s Appropriate Technologies initiative introduces sustainable, small-scale technologies which are affordable and can have an immediate improvement in time-savings, comfort, health, and safety in daily family life.

What is Appropriate Technology?

Appropriate Technologies are simple (appropriate) technological solutions to common problems that families living in extreme poverty face.

Examples of appropriate technology already implemented at Love A Child include:

Drip-Irrigation Systems – more efficient irrigation for crops.
Alternative cooking methods – faster, cleaner, healthier cooking.
Solar dehydrators – extends food usefulness.
Other innovations that help solve food and energy problems in rural Haiti
Alternative fuel
Tire Gardens
Home fertilizer and insecticides

How Haitian families benefit…

One of the best benefits of appropriate technology use is the freeing-up of valuable time from demanding daily chores. This allows a Haitian time for a job instead of spending all day trying to access basic needs such as water, food, fuel, and sanitary conveniences.

To learn how these simple devices save time and lives, click through our image gallery below.

Most Haitians cook over an open fire with three rocks as their stove. Their cooking fires are mostly sticks or wood made into charcoal. That is the main reason why the Haiti side of the island is an environmental disaster and has very few trees left.

Love A Child is now making these rocket stoves on the premises.

Rocket stoves are much faster, safer and use much less fuel, therefore they are much better for the environment.

This alternative method of cooking will help Haitians so they don’t have to spend all their time looking for wood with which to cook.

This is one of the first steps to a better ecologic solution than cutting down trees for cooking fuel decimating the landscape.

This young woman is enjoying cooking on her Rocket Stove, and it only takes a few bits of charcoal to cook a meal.

Biochar is charcoal used as a soil amendment. It is a stable solid, rich in carbon, and can endure in soil for thousands of years.

By making biochar from brush and other hard to compost organic material, Haitians are learning they can improve the soil. Biochar enhances nutrient availability and also enables soil to retain nutrients longer.

Adding biochar as a soil amendment improves the soil’s ability to absorb and retain moisture and also hosts beneficial soil microbes for a healthier soil.

The leftover charcoal will improve soil by improving nutrient availability and moisture retention.

This is simply biochar, before it is mixed with the soil.

This “dark earth,” that is created through biochar, persists today as a testament to an ancient soil-building method that anyone can use in the garden.

Rainwater catchment systems collect rain water, giving families reliable water for cooking, washing, drinking and irrigation.

This is a great improvement for the health of the community, by not drinking polluted water.

Having this water source right at home saves time from having to walk to wells.

Water tanks can be set up in many areas, including schools and villages.

Clean, safe drinking water for the school children.

Drip irrigation is essential to growing food here.

A good water source is often scarce in many villages.

The students from the Agricultural Training Center layout the drip-irrigation lines in the garden.

Look at the difference in a well-tended and properly irrigated garden.

This is an okra crop that is doing well with the drip-irrigation.

The solar dehydrator works well for preserving homegrown produce that would otherwise go to waste.

Haiti generally doesn’t have a reliable electric system. So we are now working on a better solution — solar power.

Re-chargeable solar lighting is environmentally friendly, affordable, simple to use, and can provide instant light for up to 12 hours per charge.

Solar power battery bank for storing electrical power.

This “arborloo” is a communal composting toilet that is re-locatable, provides improved hygiene and sanitation for a village.

This indoor composting toilet, at the ATC bunkhouse for interns, is just like the “arborloo,” requiring an organic cover material to keep odors under control and to help with the decomposition of waste.

By creating a tire garden, many people who do not have a plot of land or tillable soil are still able to grow some crops in these tires with a good composted dirt.

With proper maintenance, a Haitian can grow food for his family.

Here is a bumper crop of green onions ready to eat.

Help us make an immediate impact…

For one moment, try to imagine how you might survive with no electricity, air-conditioning, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, car or job. Consider your gift of any amount as one step toward a better life for one Haitian family. Thank you!

To learn about all of our programs, please visit our Sustainability Initiatives web pages.

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Appropriate Technologies

We demonstrate, teach and equip Haitian families with
small-scale technologies to help save time and create jobs.

What is Appropriate Technology?

Examples of appropriate technology already implemented at Love A Child include:

How Haitian families benefit…

Help us make an immediate impact…

Agricultural Training CenterAppropriate Technologies Chicken Co-op Edible Plant Nursery Marketplace Reforestation

Appropriate Technologies

We demonstrate, teach and equip Haitian families with small-scale technologies to help save time and create jobs.

What is Appropriate Technology?

Examples of appropriate technology already implemented at Love A Child include:

How Haitian families benefit…

Help us make an immediate impact…

Agricultural Training CenterAppropriate Technologies Chicken Co-opEdible Plant NurseryMarketplaceReforestation

We demonstrate, teach and equip Haitian families with
small-scale technologies to help save time and create jobs.

Agricultural Training CenterAppropriate Technologies Chicken Co-op Edible Plant Nursery Marketplace Reforestation