Awards

Vaibhav Tidke of the Institute of Chemical Technology in India will design and test a low-cost movable dryer called CassavaTech to easily and quickly dry large quantities of cassava, which is a major staple crop grown by women smallholder farmers. The majority of harvested cassava is dried to form flour and chips, but traditional hand drying methods take between five and fifteen days, which limits time for other activities. CassavaTech will reduce the drying time to only eight hours and will optimize the design and build a prototype to evaluate performance in the laboratory and using women farmers in the field.

Michael Kane and colleagues from Yale University in the U.S. will create document clustering software incorporated into a web interface to enable clinical researchers to better search through the published literature on both human and veterinary medicine, to promote new discoveries for treating disease. Online biomedical literature and genetics databases carry large amounts of information on animal and human health. However, these two specialities diverge in the ways they are documented, making comparisons across species difficult with current online search engines, even in the context of a single disease such as Rift Valley fever, which infects both humans and animals. They will apply statistics and machine learning methods to enable large quantities of diverse data streams from the human and animal medical fields to be searched, thereby promoting new research directions for Rift Valley fever and other diseases.

Mateus Marrafon and colleagues from Instituto Kairós in Brazil will produce a new system for planting seeds using biodegradable strips of paper to increase productivity and decrease time and labor costs for smallholder farmers in Africa. The seeds are attached to the tape at regular intervals, which improves growth, and the tape physically protects them from pests and high temperatures. They will generate tape prototypes for both manual and animal sowing, and test their performance in the laboratory and in the field. They will also teach individuals how to manufacture and use the seed tape.

William Kisaalita of the University of Georgia in the U.S. will redesign a milk churner to make it suitable for women in order to reduce the time and labor needed to make ghee. In many sub-Saharan countries, the morning milk harvested from cattle can be sold in markets, but the milk harvested in the evening needs to be processed into longer-lasting products such as ghee to prevent it from perishing. The current method for churning milk to make ghee is time and labor intensive. He will recruit women in Uganda to test and refine the milk churner design, which is cheap and can be locally manufactured and repaired, to make it more ergonomic and culturally appropriate for women users and thereby promote its widespread adoption.

Sara Delaney of Episcopal Relief & Development in the U.S. and Ghanaian colleagues will promote the use of donkeys with ploughs for draught power to decrease labor and increase productivity of women smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Traditionally, oxen are used as draught animals but they are often unavailable to women due to cost, gender and cultural issues, and their large size makes them difficult for women to handle. The donkey ploughs are suitable for weeding and preparing land for a variety of crops, and can be locally manufactured and maintained. The Ghanaian team will run training workshops in northern Ghana for women smallholder farmers currently using hand tools, and provide two affordable financing options for them to purchase the donkey, plough, and cart. Performance, financial aspects, and the level of adoption will then be evaluated.

Brian Lund and colleagues from Oxfam America in the U.S. will work in Cambodia to increase the use of labor-saving weeders by smallholder women farmers there. Rice cultivation is the primary source of food and income for these households, and weeding crops requires substantial time and physical effort. Cheap, easy to use, and effective mechanical weeders have been developed and tailored for smallholder women rice farmers, but they have yet to be widely adopted due to limited marketing and inadequate local fabrication and distribution capabilities. They will work with a group of local metal fabrication businesses and distributors to demonstrate the profit potential and train them to manufacture the weeders. They will also launch a marketing campaign, including local advertising and demonstrations aimed at women farmers, to stimulate demand.

James Pimundu and team from Send a Cow Rwanda in Rwanda will test whether educating men and women in Rwanda on gender barriers and social behavior issues stimulates them to use energy-saving stoves for cooking. Although affordable energy-saving stoves are available, they are not widely adopted, possibly because women have limited access to money and lack the power to make decisions. They will train both men and women to inform them of gender barriers in order to reduce inequality. By promoting better technology uptake in this way they aim to substantially reduce the time and labor costs of collecting firewood, as well as empowering the women to take control of other important family issues such as health and child care.

Mumbi Kimathi and a team from Farm Concern International in Kenya will promote farming-related trade between and around villages in rural Africa with their "e-Women Dial-up Initiative." They will develop a mobile phone platform for communications, and for ordering and paying for farming-related materials, products, and services. They will test their approach in 10 villages in Kenya, consisting of 5,000 farmers, and establish a rural distribution network by recruiting vehicle owners to reduce the need for individuals to be mobile. They will also set up a supply network of accredited materials, services, and business development service providers. Their approach will be evaluated in terms of volumes traded, income, cost- and time-savings, and the level of individual participation.

Alfred Alumai of Muni University in Uganda, along with Ronald Avutia and Yasin Angua of NilePro Trust, will evaluate the beneficial impacts of a small seeds planter for smallholder women farmers in Uganda. The tool facilitates row cultivation of millet, sorghum, and groundnuts, which saves time and labor associated with weeding and harvesting, and increases production and yield. It was developed with input from women smallholder farmers and has been successfully tested in a pilot study. They will now perform and evaluate full-scale field trials in northwestern Uganda with three women farmer groups over a six-month period. After subsequent tool refinement they will promote widespread adoption by conducting on-site demonstrations and workshops, and presentations via radio broadcasts.

Bert Rivers and colleagues of Compatible Technology International in the U.S. will test whether a recently developed suite of four manually-operated processing devices of pearl millet, which is a major food source in West Africa, is quicker and improves quality and yield compared to traditional methods. This will initially be analyzed in a test site in Senegal or Mali or both, and they will also explore local financing and manufacturing potential for more widespread distribution.