The original Tap Tap garden. Started by a handful of displaced women in a post-earthquake camp, in the neighborhood the aid world had written off. Fifteen years later, it is the root the whole network grew from.
It started in 2010, in the worst year, in the hardest place. While some NGOs still hesitated to enter Cité Soleil, a few older women living in a post-earthquake displacement camp decided to grow their own food. That first plot took root inside SAKALA, the community center founded in 2006. They named the model Tap Tap, after the painted buses that carry everyone. By 2011 it had an official launch, and it has not stopped since.
Today Site Zero is the network's headquarters and its most diversified plot: a moringa nursery, a moringa plantation, and medicinal plants, worked by 25 young people. It is the standard-setter... every protocol and training module proven here becomes the template the other TapTaps run on.
Twenty-five young people work this ground today, in one of the hemisphere's hardest neighborhoods. They are not waiting for aid to arrive. They are raising nurseries, growing moringa and medicinal plants, and learning a trade that travels to every other site in the network.
What is proven on this plot becomes the playbook everywhere else. Site Zero is not just where it started. It is where the standard is still set.
The SAKALA network at work · 2025
Photographs from SAKALA operations in the Nord and Grand'Anse. Verified Cité Soleil archive images to follow.
Cité Soleil runs on something no budget line can buy: twenty years of trust. The reason a garden can hold here, where so much else cannot, is that the people running it are from here and have been here for two decades. That trust is the real infrastructure, and it is why Site Zero became the base the whole network is built on.
Aid hesitated at the edge of Cité Soleil. The women inside it planted anyway.
The first Tap Tap garden · 2010
The numbers that matter are the ones that held up over fifteen years... from a few raised beds in a displacement camp to a model running across eight departments.
Sixteen years ago this was a few women and a vacant lot. If you have land, equipment, or a youth group ready to work, the next premier TapTap could be yours... and the next story we tell could be about your community.
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