Carleton University professor Onita Basu secured $260,000 in funding over the next four years for her project to improve climate change resilience through partnerships with students in Tanzania, Ghana and Uganda.
The initiative, named Adapting for Resilience, will build on Basu’s research on water filtration. Basu’s work in the field has spanned more than a decade, including an exploration of various sub-Saharan regions in Africa.
With funding from the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Scholarship, Basu is continuing her research on water filtration and working with graduate students from Carleton and Tanzania.
The Charlatan sat down and spoke to professor Basu about what the scholarship means for her research and the importance of multinational projects.
The Charlatan (TC): What is your research focus?
OB: My research has been a long-term project in Tanzania, looking at access to water within a marginalized community. Part of adapting resilience is training individuals within a community who can assist others, creating, in this case, a “water champion.” We have implemented a project that’s provided water filters for about 500 to 600 people, so 250 individual filters at six schools.
One of the failings that often happens in projects like this is the lack of follow-up. Part of the resilience is to continue to follow up. We hire local community members who become our water co-ordinators or water champions and they’re great because people in the community know who they are, and they can go and ask them questions.
TC: What are the goals of the Adapting for Resilience project?
Onita Basu (OB): One of the goals of the project is to enable networking between other like-minded climate change researchers globally, specifically with a sub-Saharan focus. If we can help enable a network, then we allow for that infusion of knowledge, that transfer of information. A success in one country could help be a success in another country. The lessons learned from failure in one country can help minimize failure in another country.
TC: Why is multinational research so important?
OB: It allows for network building. The way we think about things in Canada is not the way that my colleagues think about the same challenge in Tanzania. We clearly have overlaps in our thought process, but then we allow for the distinction of that particular culture, that particular country, those particular policies. When you have the overlapping concepts we actually learn a lot more.
TC: What has the reaction to the project been like in these communities?
OB: The first reaction was, “We don’t need anything, we’re fine. We don’t ever treat our water so why would we now?” Myself, undergraduate and graduate students and community members spent two or three years just talking. We would pitch ideas to community members. Some of them didn’t like it and if they did like it we would do a mini pilot of it.
The water filters are locally made, which is great. We’re getting them from a local supplier as well. The Adapting for Resilience project is allowing us to continue the water filtration program.
TC: What changes have you seen in your research over the last 10 years?
OB: One of the biggest changes that we learned was the value of education. When I was in Tanzania, a lot of the women that we worked with hadn’t finished elementary school. The understanding of the space of water and water safety wasn’t there. We embedded my research in this long-term, two-year education program. We had cohorts of women and they had these water sanitation and health education classes. The women who stayed in the program had way better health outcomes.
TC: Why is it important to connect with African countries through your research?
OB: I’ve met lovely people within various countries in sub-Saharan Africa. There’s a need to share knowledge. It’s not just that it’s somewhere in Africa or somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. There are capacity building issues that we’re aware of and the goal of the interface and the going back and forth is to help develop capacity.
Carleton graduate students are going to work in various countries in Africa to develop their knowledge sets. Then researchers from Africa are coming to Canada to develop their knowledge sets and then we all go back to our own spaces and then we can continue to develop. So it’s about this cross-transfer of knowledge and just working together.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Featured image by Sarah Yule.
