After our 3-weeks stay in Kampala to work with VMG, we took off to Jinja to start at the MACCA project which is short for Measures Against Climate Change in Agriculture and is a project funded by OvO. One of the partners of this project is Amelia Agro, a ‘model farm’ that aims to show local farmers how to optimize their activities. The core of the farm is to make a closed ecosystem that doesn’t require external resources. Jan Willem, the owner of Amelia Agro, is the man we have been in contact with during the semester and who is our host for the 3-weeks stay in Jinja, during which we focused on designing and making a compost sieve. The compost consists of all the organic waste in the farm. It is then sieved and used to grow new crops.
For the design and assembly of the compost sieve we had the help of Stephen, a local engineer. We learned that engineering in Uganda is not only theoretical but also contains the practical assembly of the machines. We learned a lot from working with Stephen and helped him with/he learned us how to do some tasks like welding, sawing and assembling some parts.
We also had the chance to help out on the farm. Here we took care of the vanilla, dragonfruit and blueberry plants.
