She spends most of the week living in Ambilobe and comes back to Diego on weekends. We also visited the school that Victorine (Rebecca and Victoria’s mom) runs. It was a really interesting day and we were really thankful Reziky taught us about his project. The idea would be to feed some rice to the chicken, feed the fish chicken poo, and then the people could eat all 3 (rice, chicken, and fish) as well. The project hopes to build an ecological cycle through a few projects: rice paddies, a chicken farm and also somehow, fish. The site hopes to create a kind of reservoir so that the population could have a livelihood there during the dry season and stay there all year instead of the temporary migration. The target population to move to the site currently lives in an area that floods for 3 months and already migrates to the site temporarily (during the wet season). The goal of the project is to create a wetter environment in a dry region so that people will migrate there and stay permanently. On Saturday, we visited Ambilobe with both the President and Vice-President to look at a research site for water management of 2 small rivers near the Mahavavy River. The beach/bay was so beautiful and is famous for hosting international windsurfing competitions. They also trained 2 villagers to maintain and repair any of the parts as well as log recordings daily.ĭr Tefy surprised us after visiting Ivovona and took us to Sakalava Beach for lunch. There are 70 homes connected to the grid and they pay 10 000 Ariary per month (approximately 5$). There are 2 wind turbines there and together, they produce 10 000kW/year (we think is what they told us), and the solar panels produce 2kW/year. The only 2 months of the year (December and January) that are not windy enough to power the villages, so they also installed solar panels. The wind comes off of the Indian Ocean and is especially strong during the dry season (right now). The north coast of Madagascar has a special wind phenomena called Varatraza. On Friday, Dr Tefy and her two colleages took us to Ivovona, a wind powered fishing village.A local wind power company called Madeole installed wind turbines in 4 villages (Ivovona is one of them) in the northern region of Madagascar. Posted in Summer 2012 | Leave a reply The big weekend! Her name is Colombe, and we will be working closely with her to become familiar with the people where we will be collecting data and also to communicate with the people of KOFAMA. There is a student from the Anglo-American Studies program at UNA who is interning at KOFAMA. Right now he is working with lettuce farmers to organize an association of farmers so that they can fundraise for a communal treadle pump. So instead of us building the pump, we just set in motion the process of acquiring it and now it is up to Ted and the villagers. They have a really good program that evaluates if the location fits the technical criteria, then they have educational programs on maintenance and good agricultural practices. We originally thought we could try to design a treadle pump (foot pedal water pump) for/with the farmers using local materials, but we later found that there is (quite conveniently) a program with UNA and a Swiss NGO called W3W (Water for the Third World) that builds and distributes treadle pumps in Madagascar. We are really excited to have made really good connections at the University and to have built up a network here to acquire resources.įrom Saturday (June 23) until July 21, we will be staying at the KOFAMA campsite gathering data for our project, working with the KOFAMA co-op to improve their business and also helping Ted, the Peace Corps volunteer in the region with some development projects. The first goal of the project is to ensure there will be electricity in the essential services of Antsiravibe (schools and hospitals) and secondly to provide power for villages as well as a few low key touristic attractions. We will be using computer programs such as AUTOCAD, ArcGIS, HEC-RAS, and a few other modelling programs to determine where the best location for the power to be generated. We have 2 supervisors in the civil/hydraulic engineering department. There is a Master’s student from the electrical engineering department to do that component of the project. The project that we will be working on during our stay at KOFAMA will be:Įvaluating hydroelectric potential of the Ankarana River
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