South Africa has just come through the worst drought in many years with crops failing, people and livestock dying, rivers drying up and dams at all-time lows. While many regions have since received quite a bit of rain, dams are still not even 50% full and there are still some regions suffering without water.
Kiara Nirghin, a 16 year old school pupil from St Martins High School in Johannesburg, South Africa, has a love for chemistry and has always had an interest in food science, which is why she decided to study drought.
Kiara is one of the female students involved in STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and the recent drought drove her to try and find some solutions to failing crops and rising food costs. She was recently announced as a Google Science Fair Community Impact Award for the Africa and Middle East region.
Kiara came up with a novel way to potentially aid in combatting drought; she created a super absorbent polymer (SAP) capable of storing reserves of water hundreds of times its own weight using avocado skins and orange peels. The biodegradable material, when applied to the soil, forms tiny reservoirs which absorb rainwater and then supply the plants’ roots with water.
While Kiara’s invention may not ward of drought, it does tackle the effects of drought, and as a bonus it also makes good use of something which is normally just thrown away.
“Kiara found an ideal material that won’t hurt the budget in simple orange peel, and through her research, she created a way to turn it into soil-ready water storage with help from the avocado,†said Andrea Cohan, program leader of the Google Science Fair.
Kiara is delighted at the award, and says that she still wants to do much more research on the subject and, as part of being a regional winner includes being assigned a mentor mentor from Google to work with her on developing the polymer, she hopes to take her invention much further and possibly emulate the work of her hero, is the Indian agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan.
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