Siajali Pamba has been a lecturer and researcher at the University of Dar es Salaam since he earned his PhD there in 2015 through WIO-RISE. His specialty, as he describes it, is “non-living things” — the transport and dispersal of suspended particulate matter in Tanzanian estuaries. His particular focus has been the Pangani River and its estuary.
In this ambitious project, he faced at the outset difficult unknowns: (1) where in the Pangani estuary did suspended particulate matter “prefer” to be deposited, and at what rate; (2) how much did tidal current, salinity, river discharge, and monsoon winds affect the deposition of matter; and (3) to what extent can satellites be used to map the dispersion of suspended matter. All of these questions are relevant in setting policy to control runoff from agriculture, industry, forestry, and other activities. These activities are important to Tanzania because they inevitably expose the soil to erosion, and this erosion in turn affects the downstream fisheries, navigation, and other uses of the large estuary.
Answering the first question, said Pamba, has been a matter of “pure field work.” Major tasks were to design sediment traps and deploy them around the Pangani estuary. Each month he faced the difficulty of locating these traps, retrieving their samples, and taking the samples to the lab to quantify the amounts of sediment. Each trap was set out in such a way that it could pick up suspended particulate matter in a pattern covering the southern, central, and northern areas of the estuary.
Answering the second question required both fieldwork and the development of a hydrodynamic model, using a brand of software called MIKE 21. To gather data for the model he deployed a current meter which allowed him to create an acoustic Doppler current profile. This made it possible to see how sediment velocity varied with depth, determine the direction of tidal currents and magnitude, and measure the salinity at different points of the estuary.
Answering the third question required the ability to analyze the dispersion of the suspended particulate matter as detected by satellites. This process required some skills he did not yet possess, so his principal adviser, Yohanna Shaghude, Director of UDSM's Institute of Marine Sciences, helped him arrange a research visit to one of the other WIO-RISE nodes, at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. At UCT, Pamba found expertise in using and interpreting high-resolution tools to extract much more information from the satellite imagery and to analyze the data. These tools allowed him to create images of the suspended sediment corresponding to the entire coastal zone of Tanzania. “This was really hard to do from here in Tanzania,” he said. “We could get the basic satellite data from the website, but we couldn’t see it in high resolution, and this is what we really needed.”
When he was able to assemble all his results from the field and satellite measurements, he found that most of the suspended particulate matter was being deposited on the north side of the estuary. Almost 392 kilograms of sediment per square meter per year was being deposited in the north, accumulating to a depth of about 13 meters at the locations of the traps. By contrast, very little was being deposited in the central or southern areas.
In addition, the modeling techniques allowed him to discover why more sediment was being deposited on the northern side. The satellite data made it clear that a strong current was flowing from south to north, carrying the sediment with it, and that the current was bending the river inflow northward as well.
Several other factors influenced this picture. During the dry season, he found, when river flow was reduced, more tidal salt water was pushing its way up-current, out of the estuary and into the river. At the same time, a greater percentage of the river silt was being deposited in the estuary because the water flow was not strong enough to transport it beyond the estuary into the ocean.
Pamba emphasizes that he received strong support from mentors at several nodes of the WIO-RISE network, in addition to its principal node at the Institute for Marine Sciences. “I worked closely with Antonio Hoguane,” he said, referring to the leader of the node at Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique. “He assisted me a lot with input and helped me in how to set up experiments, present the results, interpret the meaning of results, and polish the presentation.” After successfully defending his thesis, Pamba has been promoted to lecturer at UDSM, and will soon move ahead to become a senior lecturer after disseminating the findings through publications.
An earlier post about Siajali Pamba can be found here.
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The Long Road from Village Life to a PhD (WIO-RISE)
by Alan Anderson
January 25, 2016
Edward Moto (his last name means “fire” in Swahili) was born in a village in the Mwanza region of northern Tanzania, which borders the vast Lake Victoria. His parents were peasant farmers, raising cattle and tending rice, cassava, and maize. Like so many other young boys in rural Tanzania, Edward and his two brothers were expected to contribute to the hard labor of farming. There was little talk around the family table of his going to school, let alone of pursuing an advanced academic track that would lead to a doctoral degree.
A welcome turnaround in his early career, however, came in the form of an uncle who spoke persuasively to Edward’s parents about the advantages of modern schooling. He could and did point to himself as an example of such a course, since his schooling had qualified him for a rewarding job in charge of a milk processing company owned by the government. “I could see he really enjoyed what he did,” said Edward, recalling a visit to the company. “He studied procurement at the university, and that’s what he did.” (At the time, the government owned almost all industries, because the president of Tanzania was then Julius Nyerere, who believed firmly in public ownership.)
The uncle was the youngest of five children. He had lived near a Catholic mission, which had its own school. Unlike his four siblings, who attended classes without much enthusiasm, he enjoyed his studies. After holidays, he was the only one of the Motos who was eager to return to his classes.
Mwanza, Tanzania
In 1986 Edward was sent to primary school some 50 miles from home, and in 1990 he moved to the city of Mwanza for last two years of primary school. In 1993 he entered Mwanza Secondary School for ordinary secondary study, and did well enough to get into Pugu High School in Dar es Salaam in 1997 for advanced secondary study — a government school where Nyerere himself had once taught.
After Pugu High School, he moved back to his parents' home in Mwanza region and waited for the results of his advanced secondary school coursework. During that period he assisted his parents with farming. When the results came out, he learned that he had performed well and had qualified for undergraduate studies. Although he was convinced that furthering his education was the right choice, Edward was still not sure where it would lead him. When he finished high school, however, he had had to fill out a form specifying what he would like to do next. He saw two possibilities that appealed to him: Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) in Morogoro or Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) in Dar es Salaam. “I decided to go for agriculture,” he said. “Why? Because SUA offered a [bachelor’s] scholarship.”
There was also another reason: He had a long-time friend who was working in agriculture and liked it. He advised Edward that “once you study agriculture, you can have your own business, such as selling pesticides. You can have a good career.”
Edward said that some kind of strategy was necessary in order to have a good career in agriculture. “You have to look at the business side as well,” he said. “You know that 80 percent of Tanzanians are farmers, but they are [operating on a] very small [scale]. They barely have enough food for themselves, and a little left over to sell. It takes capital to buy land and be well-off. Well-off means that you might have 100 hectares of land, say, and a tractor. That was my dream — to have a big farm. But I didn’t have any capital, so I needed a way to earn some.” A weakness in the national agricultural system is the lack of a loan structure; only now is a state farmers’ bank planned, for 2016.
An enumerator uses a poster to obtain informed consent for research in Morogoro, Tanzania
In 2001 he was accepted to SUA and studied there as an undergraduate through 2004. By then his friend had a job with government, as a livestock officer in the district of Misungwi in Mwanza region, inspecting and treating animals.
Once Edward was well into his studies at SUA, however, he started becoming more interested in pursuing research, and by his last year he felt the pull toward a career as a faculty member. He didn’t know how to go about it, so he decided to follow his friend’s advice and work with the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries Development. In 2005 he returned to the town of Mpwapwa to work as an assistant researcher in a government-owned livestock research center.
He liked the work, but was discouraged by the center’s perennial shortage of research funds. He found that the only way to do some interesting work was to do what he could on his own time, at his own expense.
Then in 2006 a friend told him about a scholarship for MSc students in Belgium, for which he applied and was accepted. This seemed to lead in the right direction, so he moved to Belgium for two years to pursue his master's degree through the Interuniversity Programme on Molecular Biology (IPMB), jointly organized by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Universiteit Antwerpen. His advisor was a postgraduate researcher studying infections contracted by female pigs that were nursing their young. The piglets were becoming infected with E. coli, which is usually kept in-check by mucins, gel-like substances the mother pigs secrete to protect the piglets from infection. Edward tried varying the diets of the pigs, suspecting that different foods might affect the genes controlling mucin production, but none of the foods he tested made any difference on the milk genes.
University of Dodoma
Despite his lack of success on that project, he returned to his job in Mpwapwa in October 2009, hoping for a position in academia. He applied for and was hired as an assistant lecturer at the University of Dodoma, which he at first found overwhelming. In his developmental biology class, he was asked to teach no fewer than 190 students. “They were noisy and difficult,” he said. “No one was learning anything. So I divided them into two groups, and this made a difference.” He also had an evolution class with 70 students — again, a high number — and a more manageable animal behavior class with 22. But none of his classes was in his own field of microbiology, which he had studied as both an undergraduate and a master’s student.
When he saw a notice in 2011 about an opening in WIO-RISE for a PhD candidate at the University of Dar es Salaam's Institute of Marine Sciences in Zanzibar, he was ready to advance his own studies, and to take a break from crowded classrooms. Reading further, he learned that they preferred someone with an interest in marine science.
“Of course I didn’t have any background in marine science. They wanted a concept note, so I read about marine biology to look for something interesting. I came up with phytoplankton, which had things in common with microbiology and agriculture.” He decided on a title for his concept note: “Seasonal Diversity and Biomass Production in Zanzibar Coastal Waters.” The objective is to quantify the populations of phytoplankton in various locations throughout the year, a fundamental exercise in studying the marine environment.
Another advantage of this topic was that other researchers had asked this same question over a period of decades, beginning in 1977 and then again in 1995 and 1996. This gave him comparison points that he could then align with other parameters, such as water temperature, water chemistry, or predator species. He learned that 277 species of phytoplankton were found in 1977, 168 in 1995, and 171 in 1996. He identified 260 species.
“I asked myself, why are the numbers so different? Was it the technique? Lack of identification keys? Different sampling sites? pH, salinity, temperature, nutrients? We do know that the amount of biomass is much higher here along the beach of Stone Town than near an island 8 km away from the harbor, and that’s because of the high level of nutrients from sewage and other organic waste. But we still have much to learn about phytoplankton.”
Edward finds his marine work more interesting than agriculture, and is now writing up his thesis. He has submitted a draft to his advisors, Dr. Margareth Kyewalyanga of IMS-UDSM in Zanzibar and Dr. Thomas Lyimo of UDSM. In the summer of 2015, Edward returned to Dodoma to take up his work as an assistant lecturer. He anticipates finishing his thesis in October, and receiving his PhD in 2016. Edward has proposed a program in marine biology to the University of Dodoma, despite its considerable distance from salt water. And he promises to keep us informed.
Making the Case for Computation and Modeling (WIO-RISE)
by Alan Anderson
September 15, 2015
Dr. Majuto Clement Manyilizu is a lecturer in informatics at the College of Informatics and Virtual Education on the half-finished but sparkling new campus of the University of Dodoma in Tanzania. It is difficult to reconcile this accomplished, reserved, and respected man, sitting in his tidy office, with the child born not so long ago in a remote village just south of Lake Victoria, in the Shinyanga region. To begin his education when he reached age seven, he had to apply to a primary school in a nearby district, where he was turned down.
“They examined me,” he recalled. “I was supposed to be able to touch my left ear with my right hand, but I couldn’t do it. So I wasn’t allowed to go to primary school for two more years. My father, who worked as a clerk in the primary court of our ward, decided he would teach me at home by himself, and he did that for two years.”
By the time Majuto was nine, not only could he touch his ear, but he could also handle any course material his teachers threw at him. He breezed through primary school, and was then admitted to St. John Paul II Secondary School, which was run by Kahama Parish. After that he joined a more challenging technical high school run by the government: Moshi Technical High School in Moshi, the capital of Kilimanjaro region. This was a big change for a village boy, taking him some 300 miles eastward from his home. He wore a uniform and was told that he had to pass every course or face expulsion. “But I was a good student,” he said with a smile. “I always enjoyed my studies, and I was always at the top of my class. I still enjoy doing research and working hard on a problem.”
Indeed, throughout high school he thrived in the challenging environment of the school, excelling in mathematics and the sciences. After completing his Advanced level exams, he stayed home for a year to teach in secondary schools in his hometown, after which he applied to the largest institution of higher education in the country, the University of Dar es Salaam. “I knew I would study science,” he said, “and I especially liked math. It was not as tough as chemistry, which has a lot of memorizing, and didn’t need as much effort as biology. I passed all of the sciences, but I liked math the best because I like solving problems. In mathematics, once you get the principles, it’s easy to solve the problems.”
Majuto’s breadth of interests and love of problem solving served him well at UDSM. There he completed a major in computer science without difficulty, and after that, he heard about an excellent program in physical oceanography at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where was accepted to work at the master’s level. He found this new field fascinating, delighting in the complex oceanographic problems presented by his mentor, Professor Chris Reason.
University of Cape Town
After finishing his MSc work, he had neither an academic post nor a bursary for further studies. But Prof. Reason happened to be a leader in the Western Indian Ocean Regional Initiative (WIO-RISE), and he advised Majuto to apply to do his PhD through the network.
He was accepted, and promptly chose a complex—and mathematics-based—research project involving the potential effects of climate change on the circulation and properties of the Western Indian Ocean. He focused on the near-shore shelf off his native Tanzania, and began to study the scientific literature concerning all the major parameters of the ocean, including temperature, current, salinity, and sea surface height. The Tanzanian shelf region has proven highly sensitive to climate variability, which has caused droughts or floods at least once a year for the past three decades, and understanding the responses to future climate change is a high priority for Tanzania and other countries bordering the ocean.
Near the coast, he found only small variations of temperature, but offshore the variability was much stronger. The question he asked during his research was why there should be such large differences.
To predict the effects of climate change on ocean parameters, he had to learn numerical modeling, which would allow him to simulate ocean behavior mathematically. Some of the complex systems that had to be incorporated in the model were the Northeast Madagascar Current (NEMC), the upwelling water from the Seychelles-Chagos thermocline ridge (SCTR), the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Indian Ocean Dipole events, solar radiation, local wind stress, and the Coriolis effect. Since he enjoys mathematics, a task that would be onerous for many was a rewarding challenge for him.
The model he used helped provide some answers. The offshore region of high variability, he said, was influenced by internal dynamics produced by El Niño. Near shore, however, the influence of El Niño was much weaker, for several reasons. First, the currents were stronger, mixing the water of the region and preventing sharp changes of temperature. Also, the winds were stronger, which mixed the waters of different regions and temperatures.
(a, b): Standard deviation of the monthly sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies, with Boxes A1 and A2 representing coastal waters in the Tanzanian shelf region (40–45° E, 8–11° S) and B1 and B2 representing the open ocean (48–54° E, 1° N–2° S). (c, d): Square of the correlation coefficient between the monthly SST anomalies in the entire domain and those averaged over the coastal ocean, as extracted from Boxes A1 and A2. From one of Majuto's publications, linked to the image.
“That’s what models allow scientists to do,” he said. “We can change this parameter, and then that parameter, and see what happens when we feed the new model into the computer. The modeling is very complicated, but that’s the way nature is. You have to be able to see all the forces operating at once.”
His PhD publication, “Simulation of Variability in the Western Tropical Indian Ocean,” co-authored by Reason and two other colleagues, addressed all of these issues. “We tried to see the contribution of external and internal forces,” he said. “I removed the wind to see what would happen. This is what you can do by modeling.”
While he was doing his PhD research in Cape Town in 2010, he was also keeping an eye out for post-PhD opportunities. He heard of an opening at the brand new University of Dodoma, established in Tanzania’s political capital some 250 miles west of Dar es Salaam. He applied, and flew north for an interview. He secured the faculty post in 2010, but was allowed to complete his PhD studies before reporting for faculty duties.
“It would have been challenging to continue my research in Dodoma,” he said. “I wanted to do some virtual research, some modeling, and that needs powerful computers and hardware that did not yet exist there.”
University of Dodoma, Tanzania
The College of Informatics and Virtual Education did exist, however, and he became a lecturer there as soon as he graduated in 2014. He also became something of an academic pioneer, with few students or peers. In the past year, however, his college has begun to grow, and now has a dean who is a full professor, a principal, and two other PhDs besides himself. His primary job is to teach two courses: one in graphical information systems (GIS), the other in software analysis and error detection. Next year he’ll add a course in virtual education, or machine learning—the use of technologies to assist teaching and learning. He is also doing unpaid work in coordinating research and publications.
“We desperately need staff here,” he said, “but they are hard to find. We try to hire locally, but few Tanzanians have the training we need. It’s more expensive to hire international staff because they are considered ‘expert.’ The hardest staff to find are those with an MSc or PhD.”
He was drawn to informatics for the same reason he enjoys modeling—its applicability “to other parts of life. I always like to understand why we are working with some idea.” He finds that informatics has broad applications in a variety of disciplines. He believes so much in its importance, in fact, that he has established an all-volunteer group of junior faculty to help other faculty members understand the value of research in general and the use of vital new research tools—especially modeling, simulation, informatics, and virtual education.
The Computation and Modeling Research Group at the University of Dodoma
“I want to see how society can be connected,” he said. “When we established our group, I had been trying to do pure science, but a lot of pure science does not address the needs of society directly. There are a lot of gaps.”
He has named his small enterprise the Computation and Modeling Research Group, whose overall objective is to enhance all kinds of research activity at the university. The genesis of the group lay in Majuto’s discovery that many faculty members had little understanding of either the importance or the methods of research. Many are hampered, for example, by poor backgrounds in statistics, a cornerstone of the physical, life, and social sciences.
“We need to shift direction in academic science and engineering,” he said, “away from just theory and lecturing.” Knowledge of modeling and computation, he believes, can help faculty do better research and students to understand the purpose of what they are studying.
“The dominant need for staff here,” he said, “is a better appreciation of techniques that help forecast, or ‘hindcast,’ an event; this is what modeling is useful for. Other activities that can benefit from modeling include science that uses huge amounts of data, such as gene and protein studies.”
He began to plan the group’s strategy by surveying the needs and abilities of faculty members. He was surprised to find that even faculty members in engineering and science lacked common research knowledge. Accordingly, he raised his objective even higher, and became determined to offer access to research skills for the entire university. At the same time, he has set out to motivate faculty, to build awareness of computation and modeling, and to prepare secondary school students for research activities.
“From our preliminary survey results,” he said, “the majority of staff are not aware of research tools. Our task is to motivate them and show them the power of these tools. We are also trying to solve a practical problem—figuring out why performance in science is so poor. Practical science is not taught well—most classes don’t even have labs for practice. My idea is to offer more virtual methods, so students can at least visualize what happens in real labs. We can give them questions to answer: What research would they do if they could? I am convinced that virtual techniques can excite them about the real thing.”
His group has conducted a survey of secondary schools—both public and private—which has helped them better understand the features of the local academic population. They have begun to correlate the age of secondary school teachers with the use of ICT. For example, recent graduates (age 25-35) have more knowledge of ICT, while older graduates have less. “We are also looking at other parameters for teachers: educational level, type of schools attended, ICT training. We’d like to dedicate one of the computer labs to packages of modeling so people can use them. Someone from our group will volunteer to lead it. We need financial support to provide the tools for this.”
He said that in the School of Virtual Education, the second school in his college, both students and staff are somewhat aware of research methods. The first tool being taught is statistics, using a package for social sciences developed by Stanford and now owned by IBM. “But we are having to struggle to make staff and students see the need for this. In our college we are using Matlab and Stata software, trying to make sure people from all fields move from descriptive statistics to inferential statistics. We are approaching the time for intervention when we can help them do more.” He is also introducing the topic of probability, which holds interest for students going into business, and teaching the value of better writing skills.
The Computation and Modeling Research Group now meets every Saturday to strategize and plan for the future. “We have a small fund from SIG for this,” he said, “and we use it sparingly. We have shown that we can keep a team together that works day and night just for developing these skills. We will help staff development, but we need some more support. If we can find that, there will be a larger group, with more faces from more colleges in the university. Right now, six of us are from my college, and one is from the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences. We think the majority of staff are not even aware of these tools. We need to be working with everyone.”
Francis Murage Mwonjoria’s academic career as a biologist began auspiciously and rapidly. He earned a BSc in botany and zoology from the University of Nairobi, followed by an MSc in hydrobiology. For his master’s degree, he joined a research project that was both interesting and valuable: measuring the results of efforts to restore mangrove ecosystems to good health. He and his team chose the mangrove region of Gazi Bay, near Mombasa, which has suffered from deforestation and water pollution for many years. The loss of trees had become a considerable threat to the local population, which both harvested the wood and depended on the health of the forests at the same time. The deforestation had other negative effects, including decreased availability of wood, fish, and prawns; lower revenues paid to the government in royalties and tourist fees; an increase in coastal erosion; and the eventual reduction of sea grasses and coral reefs.
Efforts to replant the mangrove forests by hand had begun in the 1990s, but little was known about how effective these efforts were. To answer this question, Francis’ team set out to evaluate and compare three types of environments: (1) undisturbed forests, (2) forests that had been degraded, and (3) forests that had been degraded and replanted over a period of 10 years.
“My question was,” he said, “now that we’ve replanted them, is the ecosystem recovering? What we found was good recovery when reforested. It was not complete, but very exciting. When you look at the animals from all of these environments, one, two, and three, you can see everything coming back: nematodes, copepods, then the fish.”
It was not so easy, however, to measure the fish populations. The biologists did use the traditional fish traps, or malema, which are wooden structures that allow fish to enter and then prevent them from leaving. But it was very hard with this technique to catch statistically useful samples. So Francis and the others used an ad hoc system of “stick nets,” which was not traditional.
“We would bury a net in a trench,” he said, “and then six of us would station ourselves all around the net, each holding a stick. When enough fish came over the net someone would yell ‘One, two, three’ and we would all pull up on our sticks and bring the net up under the fish. This was very hard, and we had to do a lot of it by swimming. Then we still couldn’t count the fish, so we had to leave the net up on the sticks until the tide went out.”
After this interesting project, his career all but came to a halt. He faced the same quandary as most of his RISE colleagues: finding the support to continue working toward a PhD. He did keep busy, including his duties as one of the chief fisheries officers of Kenya, and persisted in his efforts to land some kind of scholarship.
“It’s very hard,” he recalled, shaking his head. “We had no support in Nairobi. I spent ten years applying for scholarships everywhere: DAAD, SIDA, JICA. Every year the chances became less, because the foundations give preference to recent graduates. I heard about RISE in Nairobi, and everyone was surprised when I got the scholarship. Even my seniors at the Ministry of Fisheries can’t find support for research. You struggle, you just struggle to get research money. So this was like a dream. I feel very good.”
For his RISE work he will change gears to investigate the steady decline in the near-shore squid population in Kenya. This will be done at the Institute for Marine Sciences in Zanzibar, where faculty members have ample expertise to supervise his work. “My question is simple,” he said: “Why is it going down? This is important because squid meat is very popular locally and for export. In fact, it costs more than fin fish.” Part of the reason for its popularity in Kenya, he said, is its unfortunate reputation as an aphrodisiac; it is also said to help nursing mothers produce more milk.
While overfishing is clearly a threat, this common species, the bigfin reef squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana), has been reported in the literature to decline with rising sea temperatures. Francis has begun his investigation here, using surface data from the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He will also collect data from fishermen in the jig fishery, who search for squid at night using lights, and from the Ministry of Fisheries. Finally, he will survey the records of companies that use ships to troll for prawns, lobster, and squid, including East African Seafoods, Basta and Sons, and Trans-African Fisheries. He already has the title of his study, if not the results: “A Survey of the Squid Fishery of Kenyan Coastal Waters, With Emphasis on the Biology and Ecology of the Bigfin Reef Squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana).”
“I think it is mostly global warming,” he hypothesized. “But we have many questions. The squid is susceptible to degradation of the environment, especially deforestation. El Nino has caused a lot of rain, soil runoff, and coral reef die-off. I must also look at the southeast monsoon, which can bring lots of changes in the sea from spring to September. When current velocities are very strong, they can affect the reproduction of the squid. So there may be more than one cause.”
I am currently working for the Mauritius Research Council (MRC) as a Research Assistant. The MRC was set up in 1992 to promote and coordinate government investment in research. I am based on Rodrigues Island. The Rodrigues Office of the MRC was launched at Port Mathurin, Rodrigues Island, on 31st October 2011.
The objectives of the MRC Rodrigues office are to:
address potential research gaps in Rodrigues
act as a platform for technology transfer between Mauritius and Rodrigues
promote capacity building in research and research-related sectors
Apart from my work for the MRC, I have recently initiated an NGO (Ter-Mer Rodriguez) by gathering several young professionals/graduates in the fields of agriculture, health and safety, environmental science, marine biology, marine sciences, statistics, biology, fisheries sciences, entrepreneurship, coastal engineering and social science. The rationale behind gathering the young Rodriguan professionals was to constitute a strong team that can think about and work toward sustainable development. The objectives of Ter-Mer Rodriguez are to:
conduct multidisciplinary research
promote education and awareness campaigns around the theme of sustainable development (on Rodrigues Island)
foster capacity building
conduct projects aimed at promoting a sustainable Rodrigues Island
Rodrigues Island accounts for about 108 square kilometers of land that is surrounded by coral reefs, making a 200 km lagoon. The main socio-economic and livelihood activities of Rodrigues involve agriculture, fishing, tourism and small and medium enterprises. Rodrigues Island aspires to become a model in sustainable development. In the face of the world economic crisis and climate change, a small island such as Rodrigues needs to adopt a model of socio-economic development and strategies that involve moving towards sustainable development. The mission of Ter-Mer Rodriguez is to work towards promoting a Sustainable Rodrigues Island.
A managing committee has been constituted, and I will be serving as the president of the organization for the next two years. The NGO is new, and we want to work towards becoming a key actor in the development of Rodrigues Island, becoming known and accepted locally and internationally so that we can better serve our island. While the NGO is awaiting legal status, the managing committee has already prioritized some projects that coincide with the theme Sustainable Rodrigues Island.
Also, I have recently been appointed as the Focal Point for Coral Reef Management under the Indian Ocean Commission/ ISLANDS Project of the Rodrigues Regional Government. The work consists of fostering best coral reef management practices. Through this initiative I have recently participated in a study tour in Queensland, Australia.
One of the main goals in my life is to be able to contribute to the development of my island. I intend to pursue my PhD studies without having to leave my island, as certain universities offer programs that allow students to conduct PhD research work in their home countries. I hope to study the management of marine and coastal resources, thus directly helping my island.
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Siajali Pamba: Learning to Model River Flow (WIO-RISE)
by Alan Anderson
May 16, 2011
When we posted our first blog entries for the Institute of Marine Sciences in Zanzibar, Siajali Pamba had just begun his PhD work there, under IMS director Prof. Alfonse Dubi. By now Pamba (he is called by his last name) is well along in his field research, and with Dr. Dubi’s departure, the advisory duties have moved to Dr. Yohana Shaghude and Prof. Alfred Muzuka. His topic, as he carefully explains, is to “investigate the transport and dispersion of suspended particulate matter.”
This new topic represents a considerable expansion of the research he did as a master’s student at the University of Dar es Salaam between 2004 and 2008. There he worked on the same general subject — suspended particulate matter — but his target was specifically marine pollution. In particular, he was interested in the ability of mangrove trees to filter and clean wastewater before it was returned to the ocean. His focus was the large tourist hotels near the shore, which emit a steady discharge of sewage water into the ocean. Pamba decided to propose a more environmentally friendly method by running the wastewater first into a pond where suspended particulate matter could both settle to the bottom and be taken up by the mangrove trees in a self-sustaining system of water purification.
He found that the system was indeed helpful, with the mangrove trees absorbing a good deal of the suspended nutrients, but that the trees needed more time to do a thorough job. He calculated that the wastewater was spending an average of about three days in the settling pond before moving through to the ocean, and that it needed to stay there at least six days for the system to be effective. Also, the trees were unable to remove bacteria from the water, so that an additional treatment step would be needed involving chlorination or a bactericide.
After he completed his own investigation, another student took up the project while Pamba wrote up his results for his master’s thesis. He also published a research paper on his work, and then faced the challenge of getting the word of his findings out to the community. He tried to arrange a meeting with the hotels themselves, he said, but “the political system did not support this.” He then wrote an article for the Dar es Salaam newspaper, the Daily News, which was printed, and he also took a video of his results to the local television station. He is still uncertain about whether his suggestions will be adopted, but he hopes to continue publicizing the results.
When he was accepted into the RISE program to begin work in 2009, he broadened his work to include one of the major water systems of Tanzania, the Pangani River and its estuary. His goals include the monitoring and measuring of sediments suspended in the water, as well as measuring the river flow, tides, waves, and salinity.
There are many reasons for doing this work, he said, especially in a country with little rainfall and heavy dependence on agriculture. In Tanzania, more than 70 percent of the flow of the five major rivers is pumped out for irrigation before it reaches the ocean. As the economy matures, more water will be needed for industry and power generation.
“A lot of water is extracted without considering the impact on the estuary,” he said. “If the river flow is too low when it reaches the coast, it does not supply the necessary nutrients and sediment that makes the estuary productive. This affects many kinds of fisheries, especially the prawn fishery, and navigation.”
Already at Pangani, he said, so much water is extracted upstream that salt water is intruding higher into the river. At 20 kilometers upriver from the coast the salinity now rises to 17 parts per thousand.
Much of his work involves the placement of monitoring devices. He has installed a current meter to monitor river flow, and 13 sediment traps across the river mouth and along the estuary. He has retrieved core samples from four places in order to obtain records of past sediment deposition to compare with the present. Prof. Muzuka has been helping him to prepare and analyze the sediment.
The work has not been easy. In choosing to study the Pangani River, Pamba must travel from Zanzibar to Dar, and then northward to the small town of Pangani where there are few resources and many physical challenges. The estuary is often buffeted by high waves and winds, so the research equipment has to be well secured. In rough waters, safety concerns mandate that two divers must be used to retrieve and replace sediment traps. In addition, a security guard must be employed to watch over the current meter.
His next challenge is to learn new computer skills to accompany the field work. He is scheduled to travel with Dr. Shaghude to the University of Cape Town, South Africa, to learn MIKE-21, an advanced software program created by the Danish Hydraulic Institute (DHI). He will then be able to enter his own data and satellite data into this software, allowing him to model many conditions of the river and estuary, including water flows, waves, sediments, and ecological features.
At a practical level, MIKE-21 can be used for many tasks, such as to optimize port layout and coastal protection measures, estimate availability of cooling water for industry and power generation, analyze desalination and recirculation activities, and gauge the environmental impacts of marine infrastructures. It will also allow him to model and forecast coastal flooding, storm surge warnings, and inland flooding. “The dispersion of sediments depends on the river flow,” he said, “so when we know what the hydrodynamic behavior is at Pangani, it will be easy to use the software to compute what happens when the river flow changes.”
“The vision of our country is to place a priority on agriculture,” he concluded. “That will mean more demand for water. So I think the outcome of these studies will help the government plan strategically how to manage our estuaries.” Pamba’s plan is to continue his work until 2013, when he hopes to complete his PhD and then return to teaching at UDSM, transmitting his newly acquired skills to future students.
