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Graduate Students Collaborate With Locals on Food, Water, Energy Innovations
By Fid Thompson
John Samura, a UMD master’s student in agricultural and extension education, checks out an innovative irrigation system at Cultivaid’s demo farm in Dodoma, Tanzania. Samura traveled with five other Global STEWARDS Fellows to the country over winter break to learn from and share knowledge with partners about the food-energy-water nexus.
Photos by Fid Thompson
In a small village in the lush blue-green hills of Tanzania’s southern highlands, one of the biggest challenges to farmers is small: snails and other pests that eat their maize from the inside out.
“But also—and especially—the water has become toxic, contaminated from further up the river,” says one woman wearing traditional kanga and bopping a baby on her lap, at a community meeting of farmers organized by a local university.
University of Maryland epidemiology doctoral student Gerry Andhikaputra listens intently to their problems—this one caused by chemical runoff from farms—and considers the parallels with his home country of Indonesia, which also struggles to find the resources to create solutions. What is obvious to him is how public health issues are entwined with environmental and community issues.
“I now want to take a more interdisciplinary approach to my own research and see how I can collaborate with experts in other fields, like agriculture, for example. And I want to better integrate local knowledge into my work,” he said.
Andhikaputra was one of six Global STEWARDS Fellows from across UMD who spent part of winter break in Tanzania to both learn from and share knowledge with local partners, farmers and researchers. Launched with funding from the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship program, the fellowship program is now part of the $3 million Grand Challenges Grant-funded Global FEWture Alliance, which is pursuing solutions to some of humanity’s most complex problems arising at what the team calls the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus. Since 2019, other fellow cohorts have traveled to Israel and Nepal.
“This program gives students the opportunity to gain insight and expertise from our international collaborators, and for them to actively engage in research while in the country,” said Rianna Murray, assistant research professor and graduate director in the School of Public Health’s Department of Global, Environmental and Occupational Health, who led the Tanzania trip.
Tanzania is a vast country with multiple micro-climates and is largely a subsistence agricultural economy with a majority of people living below the international poverty line. The UMD group visited its semi-arid Dodoma region, known for its burgeoning grape-growing and wine industry.
Standing in the rich red mud of a collective farm that now grows grapes instead of maize, students learned from UMD partner Cultivaid how this unlikely wine region is seeking to grow into an international market and the sustainable agricultural innovations that they hope will take it there. Agronomists at Cultivaid’s teaching farm also stressed that visible demonstrations of successful innovations are essential to gain farmers’ trust.
For Fahmi Dwilaksono, a native of rural Indonesia pursuing his doctorate in environmental science and technology at UMD, meeting the farmers who work with Cultivaid was meaningful.
Dwilaksono, who is researching anaerobic digestion as a renewable energy, was moved by the way farmers worked collectively to benefit from new technology together.
“The moment we visited the farmers, it warmed my heart to see the sense of community,” he said. “It reminds me of my grandparents in Sumbawa who farmed and worked together in similar ways.”
Fellows talked with professors and students at Mbeya University of Science and Technology (MUST), which is leading work to improve agricultural yields, nutrition levels, food production and storage, water quality and agri-business.
“The partnership between UMD and MUST supports our research capacity and international visibility and also offers UMD students a valuable experience of local realities and issues,” said MUST lecturer and researcher Eliezer Mwakalapa is excited about the collaboration. “This exchange of ideas, practices and culture only strengthens a global response to the challenges we all face around food, energy and water.”
At a village near the university, UMD students helped Tanzanian researchers take water samples as part of a project led by former Global STEWARDS Fellow Ibiyinka Amokeodo to help farmers monitor chemical and microbial contamination in irrigation water.
Fellows also met with Tanzanian science and technology students as they taste-tested innovative nutritious products such as cookies fortified with eggshell powder, fruit smoothies fortified with Baobab fruit, and beet and pineapple wine.
“There is so much potential in these students and in the agriculture sector in Tanzania,” said UMD food science doctoral student Aishwarya Rao.
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