SASAC student on show in Uganda
In March, an abstract by Dennis Choruma of Rhodes University was selected for an oral and poster presentation at a summer school in Uganda; Choruma is part of the second cohort of students currently on the Southern African Systems Analysis Centre (SASAC) programme.
The summer school, titled Sustainability in the Food-Water-Ecosystem Nexus in Sub-Saharan Africa, was co-hosted by Uganda’s Makerere University in Kampala and Germany’s University of Bonn, and funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung (Foundation) under the Knowledge for Tomorrow – Cooperative Research Projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. The summer school brought together doctoral and postdoctoral young scientist from Sub-Saharan Africa and Germany with an interest in interdisciplinary research in the field of the food-water-ecosystem nexus in Sub-Saharan Africa.
At the summer school, Choruma had a chance to interact and network with other researchers working in this area. He and the other delegates also visited field sites where they met with and engaged farmers and catchment-water users on various conflicts associated with the multiple uses of water and limited availability of land. One such visit was to the Doho rice scheme, an extensive network of wetlands in the country’s Butajela district. Besides supporting the livelihoods of thousands of farmers, the wetland also regulates water flow into Lake Kyoga.