- Social Innovation Fellowship
Award Year
Danielle Dahan and Ana Heureux will travel to the Ganze District in Kenya this summer to work with the organization KOMAZA. KOMAZA is an NGO in Kenya working directly with small-scale farmers to enhance sustainable development and increase production and profit for these farmers. Rather than addressing poverty through monetary donations, KOMAZA has developed a bottom-up approach to addressing poverty by increasing production through agroforesty, which in turn allows farmers to profit from selling their crop. KOMAZA has changed the lives of many farmers who have successfully mastered the cultivation of high demand trees and transformed their farms to be far more productive. In addition to aiding KOMAZA in expanding its agribusiness branch, Danielle and Ana both have very specific focal projects based on their academic focuses and work with Engineering Solutions in Kenya over the past two years. Both Ana and Danielle's projects are focused around the increasing problem of food security in rural Kenya, but the two plan to approach the solution from different angles. Ana, a geobiology concentrator, will be working directly with soil fertility and soil replenishment, while Danielle, a Mechanical Engineering concentrator will be working with farming technologies for small-scale farmers. Having various approaches to solving this problem is appropriate considering how complex the issue of food security is and how much needs to be done in order to curb the current trend of malnutrition and poverty.