Adapted Engineering for Sustainable Development
Our aim is to develop approaches, techniques and technologies that are adapted and effective for improving the lives and livelihood of communities in low income countries.
We do so through targeted reseach that address issues of access to food, water and energy.
We are seeking to work with partners in-country for ensuring appropriateness and impact, aiming at enabling poor communities to improve their life conditions and prospects. This site also contains references and links to these partners, and we are very happy to post materials on their behalf too.
This site is hosted by Dr Dimitri Mignard from the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, who leads this nascent group.
Past and current projects include:
"Food security and reforestation in Northern Kenya and the Sahel using saline groundwater or other saline water –Monitoring and networking", funded by the University of Edinburgh’s Wellcome Trust Institutional Translational Partnership Award (iTPA) - Please see here a video covering the proof of concept for a rugged and cheap subsurface irrigation device aimed at saving water and managing soil salinity.
"Reliable, Efficient and Sustainable Mini-Grids for Rural Infrastructure Development in Kenya (RESILIENT)", led by Dr Sasa Djokic (PI) and funded by the UK PACT's Green Recovery Challenge Fund (Sept. 2021- Sept. 2022)
“Novel desalination and irrigation techniques tailored for poor rural communities in Arid and Semi-Arid Land areas”, funded by Scottish Funding Council / Grand Challenge Research Fund (March 2020 - July 2020 and Jan. - July 2021)
"Enhanced Food Security and Afforestation through Novel Approaches to Irrigation", funded by the British Council's Newton-Utafiti program (February 2018 - January 2019):
For a very quick summary of what this project was about, please open this PDF file.
For more detail, read our news article here.
For detailed results and analysis on our integrated desalination-irrigation method applied to sorghum in Turkana, you can read our peer-reviewed paper published in Journal of Dryland Agriculture (open access).
