Executive Summary
Infectious diseases and food, water, and energy shortages torment marginalized populations in the developing world. By removing aquatic vegetation from water access points, this University of Notre Dame du Lac project can increase open water access needed by villagers and reduce schistosomiasis, caused by parasites that live in snails.
Converting this vegetation to compost or livestock feed significantly increases food production, and it can be used to fuel biodigesters that produce fertilizer and gas for cooking or electricity production. Thus, a single intervention has enormous potential to sustainably address food, water, and energy shortages and a rampant infectious disease at the same time. To scale up this solution in West and East Africa, we use satellite imagery, machine learning, and cell phone alert systems. We have the potential to mechanize vegetation removal and expand our operations throughout Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
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Accomplishments
This University of Notre Dame du Lac project has achieved several recent milestones, such as demonstrating that quarterly removal of aquatic vegetation reduces snails and schistosoma reinfections in children; showing that converting the vegetation to compost increases crop production independent of tilling and fertilizer; revealing that the vegetation is readily consumed by cattle and sheep, but not goats; illustrating that the benefits of harvesting aquatic vegetation for crop production greatly exceed the costs; and establishing that we can use remote sensing to identify snail and Schistosoma habitat to scale our intervention.
We anticipate reaching other milestones, including finalizing research on the effects of vegetation removal on livestock and energy production; determining the most cost-effective use of the removed vegetation; generating maps of schistosomiasis risk; developing materials to facilitate teaching villagers to implement the intervention; scaling up the intervention training locally in collaboration with the Ministry of Health; and assessing intervention compliance and sustainability without foreign assistance.
**Please see the story about our most recent publication in Science!**
