Frugal Innovation for Societally-Important Challenges in Africa (FISICA)

Historically, Physics is seen to be a key driver of novel techniques and instrumentation that draw on our advances in scientific understanding. Such instrumentation often plays a critical role in helping to solve societal challenges in areas such as agriculture, climate change, energy generation, and healthcare. Sadly, much state-of-the-art technology is prohibitively expensive for developing countries, limiting its adoption. Here, we will bring together partners from the UK and several African countries – Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa and Tanzania – to collaborate on developing cost-effective instrumentation. The two types of instrumentation to be worked on are a hyperspectral imager and a gamma-ray spectrometer: A hyperspectral imager is an instrument that can be used to analyse fine details of the light reflected by the leaves of plants in different parts of the visible or infra-red spectrum. The properties of this reflected light turn out to be very sensitive to the health of plants or crops. In this manner, a hyperspectral imager can be a major benefit to monitoring of crops and other aspects of agricultural development. A gamma-ray spectrometer is an instrument that is sensitive to gamma radiation. Gamma radiation is emitted from so-called naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) found in certain rocks, minerals and soils. A gamma-ray spectrometer can both quantify the radiation and identify its origin. This project will begin with two workshops: one in the UK and one in South Africa. The workshops will be facilitated by experts in innovation to help the project partners co-create mini projects making use of the novel instrumentation to address challenges specific to their own localities, with a particular focus on issues such as agriculture and climate change. The project will deliberately challenge people to work in a highly interdisciplinary way and collaborate with other researchers well outside their immediate field of expertise. Impacts are expected not only in technology development but also from the field trials to be carried out with the novel instruments. The project will also lead to capability building and upskilling of significant numbers of early career researchers at universities and organisations across several Africa countries. The project builds on existing strong collaborations between the University of York in the UK and three Universities in South Africa: University of Pretoria (UP), University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the University of Zululand (UZ). Indeed, this new project will, in part, exploit earlier STFC investments (Funder Award Reference ST/S003118/1) that built the Modern African Nuclear DEtector LAboratory (MANDELA) at the two historically disadvantaged universities, UWC and UZ.