Innovating with Fatoumata: How m-farming can feed the next 2.4 billion people.
With a rapidly growing population, we must think differently about water if we want to ensure food security, conserve delicate ecosystems and reduce poverty by 2050. Fatoumata Kebe’s project CONNECTED ECO, a winner of ITU Telecom’s Young Innovators Competition, addresses this issue head on.
I am an aerospace engineer, but a 2009 trip to Mali provided inspiration for CONNECTED ECO, a social mobile farming solution which hopes to address the looming global water and food crisis.
From a young age I have been fascinated by space, looking at pictures in astronomy books before I could read. I hold an MSc in Fluid Engineering and I am in the third year of my PhD in Astronomy at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. I have also had some incredible opportunities: I have interned at the European Space Agency (ESA) and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), studied in the USA and Japan, and I currently participate in some interesting organizations including the Space Safety and Sustainability Group who are working on methods to retrieve space debris. This may not be the background that you expect for an agricultural social entrepreneur…
