Awards

Roman Thibeaux of the Institut Pasteur de Nouvelle Calédonie in New Caledonia will examine how climate-driven soil changes and societal and behavioral factors can affect the incidence of leptospirosis to develop community-centered prevention strategies. The causal agent of the disease is the bacterium Leptospira, which can be found in water or soil contaminated with the urine of infected animals and thus can spread following heavy rainfall. Leptospirosis is endemic in the New Caledonia archipelago in the South Pacific, with potential climate-driven increases in incidence. Using soil microcosms in the laboratory, they will explore the effects of temperature, rainfall, and soil structure on Leptospira survival and dispersion. Through interviews and focus groups with New Caledonia community members together with ethnographic fieldwork, they will record local perceptions and knowledge relevant to leptospirosis and its transmission. In partnership with local community members and health authorities, they will then identify sustainable strategies to reduce leptospirosis incidence.

This grant is funded by the Pasteur Network.

Monika Shukla of Buzzworthy Ventures Private Limited in India will establish a women-led beekeeping network in India to enhance crop yields through bee pollination and improve women's livelihoods. The network will be established initially in one climate zone with a known array of crops. They will educate women about bee pollination for agriculture and provide hands-on training in scientific methods of beekeeping. They will provide multiple types of support for the network, including guidance on integrating weather information to determine optimal times for harvesting honey and deploying bees for pollination, advice on running a beekeeping business, and access to an AI-based app for advice on beehive management. They will also create a community center serving the network with educational programs and as a central site for warehousing honey and processing hive products.

Provat Saha of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in Bangladesh will support women-led, rural agricultural microenterprises in Bangladesh in deploying a set of climate-smart technologies to enhance their productivity and resilience to climate change. They will engage microenterprises distributed across three sectors: vegetable cultivation, fish farming, and poultry production. They will provide each with a system for user-friendly access to weather forecasts based on international weather models. Each will also receive a cost-effective system for real-time weather monitoring, consisting of a micro-weather station along with relevant sensors, such as soil moisture meters for crops, dissolved oxygen sensors for fisheries, and ammonia and light-intensity sensors for poultry farms. They will provide technical training and guidelines on using the technologies to improve farming decisions, and they will monitor outcomes, including reductions in time, labor, and costs.

Rashima Kazal of the Association of Voluntary Actions for Society in Bangladesh will support women smallholder farmers in the southern and southwestern coastal areas of Bangladesh to improve their livelihoods and enhance their resilience to climate change. They will form and strengthen self-help groups of women farmers, providing seed money to scale-up new ideas they generate on topics such as labor-saving technologies, climate-smart tools, and digital marketing. They will provide training for the groups, including on managing livestock, preventing crop failure, and ensuring family nutrition through low-cost, short-term agricultural production and through food processing techniques that enable year-round nutrition. They will also facilitate communication between rural women's groups and relevant government ministries, committees, and policymakers, so that the perspectives of rural women farmers can be integrated into climate adaptation policies and decisions.

David Chiawo of Strathmore University in Kenya will develop an integrated approach that empowers women smallholder farmers in the Mount Kenya region to improve their livelihoods and adapt to climate change. The approach combines avocado cultivation, beekeeping for honey production, and bean farming. This integration will help women farmers optimize their limited land resources and diversify their income sources, with nitrogen fixation by beans improving soil fertility and increased pollination of avocado trees enhancing yield. The approach includes technology for digital tracking of avocados from farm to market, supporting product traceability and consumer trust to increase attractiveness for the export market. They will also establish a women-led aggregator system for farmers to pool their produce, negotiate better prices, and access larger markets more efficiently.

Emery Metelo of the Institut National pour la Recherche Biomedicale in the Democratic Republic of the Congo will test implementation by women and youth community members of a mosquito vector control program to reduce the burden of disease caused by Aedes-borne arboviruses. The program will be guided by local health authorities and the network of community health workers. It will be implemented over 15 months in two areas of the city of Kinshasa, and it will consist of community education and training of participants, followed by mosquito trapping and clearing of potential habitats for mosquito larvae. They will assess the program's effectiveness by comparing data before and after the intervention, including an arbovirus serosurvey covering dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever, and an entomological survey of mosquitos and their larvae. They will also assess changes in relevant behaviors, knowledge, and perceptions due to community participation in the program.

Bastien Linol of Nelson Mandela University in South Africa will develop a platform for crowd-sourced monitoring of surface water and groundwater by local communities in rural areas of South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya. Through collaboration across the three countries, the platform will enable geoscientists to work together with local communities to characterize the availability and quality of water sources. The research teams will train local community members as citizen scientists to collect information on water sources and take weekly samples, with data entered into a mobile application. Together with geochemical analysis of the samples, the data will be entered into a database with an interactive website for user-friendly geographic analysis and reporting back to communities. This platform for participatory science will empower local communities to make recommendations to governmental water and sanitation agencies, helping solve the water-related challenges posed by climate change.

Edita Magileviciute of the Caboverdean Ecotourism Association in Cape Verde will explore the potential of locally harvested seaweed as a biofertilizer to support rural women's livelihoods and agricultural development in Cape Verde. After women-led hand-harvesting, Sargassum and Ulva seaweed will be processed and tested for use as a safe and effective compost for vegetable crops. Testing will be in collaboration with local stakeholders and the University of York in the United Kingdom, who have assessed seaweed products in Jamaica. They will also explore dried Sargassum seaweed combined with recycled glass and plastic for production of building bricks, as well as Ulva seaweed as a food or additive to cosmetics. These seaweed-based products would provide new business opportunities for rural women, while contributing to rural agricultural development.

Richa Verma of Siddhi Vinayak Agri Processing Private Limited in India will support women entrepreneurs and women-led Farmer Producer Organizations in adopting climate-resilient potato varieties through a pilot program in four states in India. They will collaborate with Friends for Women's World Banking to support farmers' access to financial services and guidance on marketing, and they will collaborate with Agrico (Netherlands) to support decisions on potato varieties. The pilot program will be established in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Bengal, and Gujarat. They will provide training and support that broadly encompasses the business of potato farming, ranging from marketing climate-resilient seed varieties to drone-based spraying of crops to post-harvest processes that add to the agricultural value chain.

Alexandre ten Caten of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina with the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil will pilot test an affordable field-based system for measuring biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) to guide BNF-based strategies to improve crop production. They will test their system in a field experiment including crops grown with either of two treatments: nitrogen-capturing microorganisms applied to seeds or nitrogen-fixing legumes grown with the crop. They will then assess BNF, comparing measurement of nitrogen isotopes by mass spectrometry as the benchmark to spectral measurements with more affordable spectrometers. They will use machine learning to integrate data from spectral analysis of soil with that of plant leaves to generate a model, which could be incorporated into a mobile app, for more accurate BNF monitoring. They will also develop an RNA-based diagnostic test to identify plant genotypes more responsive to nitrogen-fixing bacteria. These tools would enable agricultural extension workers and farmers to independently monitor new BNF-based strategies.