Projekt

Daten zum Projekt

Junior Fellowship for Isaiah Etemo Muchilwa: Empowering Jua Kali to combat mycotoxins in Kenya's maize supplies: A participatory design approach with transdisciplinary knowledge integration

Initiative: Wissen für morgen – Kooperative Forschungsvorhaben im subsaharischen Afrika (beendet)
Ausschreibung: Postdoctoral Fellowships on Livelihood Management, Reforms and Processes of Structural Change
Bewilligung: 15.02.2017
Laufzeit: 3 Jahre

Projektinformationen

Kenya is overburdened by the high prevalence of mycotoxins that contaminate foods. With a tropical climate favourable for fungal growth, these toxins compound health problems and erode progress to eradicate poverty and hunger. Mismanagement of harvests coupled with technological deficiencies on small farms account for losses of up to 30% in annual crop yields, threatening the livelihoods of already impoverished communities. Despite global efforts to address the crisis, many solutions introduced rely on technological imports to the detriment of local microenterprises, specifically to those involved in manufacturing - such as the Jua Kali in Kenya. As sustainable livelihood management requires the integration of indigenous competencies and resources into proposed interventions, this proposed project focuses on a participatory approach to mycotoxin reduction by involving Jua Kali. Mitigating mycotoxins can offer an opportunity to develop local capacity to upgrade technologies on small farms, strengthening livelihoods and improving health of the broader population, and hence the focus of this project to analyse approaches for design optimization to combat the menace with technologies that can be used on smallholder farms and produced by the Kenyan Jua Kali sector. Using a participatory design approach to technology innovation, societal stakeholders will be brought into a knowledge creation process together with engineers, microbiologists and social scientists, that will seek to: expose and contextualise existing barriers to innovation and entrepreneurship; appraise local (on-farm) postharvest technologies with regards to potential to mitigate mycotoxins; co-design and prototype selected on-farm technologies for mitigating mycotoxins and evaluate strategic linkages to accelerate their adoption and commercialisation through the Jua kali sector. The success of this approach could inform other technological research initiatives in Africa, beyond just mycotoxin reduction as envisaged in this project.

Projektbeteiligte

  • Prof. Dr. Eva Schlecht

    Universität Göttingen
    Fakultät für Agrarwissenschaften
    Department für Nutztierwissenschaften
    Abteilung Tierhaltung in den Tropen und Subtropen
    Göttingen

  • Dr. Isaiah Etemo Muchilwa

    Moi University
    School of Engineering
    Eldoret
    Kenia

  • Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Schareika

    Universität Göttingen
    Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät
    Institut für Ethnologie
    Göttingen

  • Prof. Dr. Andreas Bürkert

    Universität Kassel
    FB 11: Ökologische Agrarwissenschaften
    Fachgebiet Ökologischer Pflanzenbau und Agraröko-
    systemforschung in den Tropen und Subtropen
    Witzenhausen

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