Dr Jabulani Nyengere

Malawi | Tropical Cyclone Freddy made landfall in southern Malawi in March 2023, causing widespread devastation. The cyclone brought torrential rainfall, leading to severe flooding and landslides that claimed thousands of lives and displaced thousands. The disaster had a profound impact on the region's infrastructure, agriculture, and overall economy. Specifically, the effect on marginalised communities has been profound and far-reaching, with devastating consequences that exacerbated existing inequalities and hindered the area's development. Cyclone Freddy intensified poverty and food insecurity through the destruction of livelihoods, diminished access to food, and the loss of assets and income sources, which further entrenched many families in poverty and hindered their ability to recover and rebuild their lives.

This rendered farmers unable to afford chemical fertilisers, which are costly and inaccessible. Innovative approaches that integrate the politics of sustainability are essential for addressing the impacts of climate change on marginalised communities. Urine fertiliser, agroforestry, and conservation agriculture are climate-smart agricultural technologies that can increase productivity and build community resilience. These technologies offer an alternative for communities affected by climate change to enhance crop yields and ensure food security.

Urine fertiliser has the potential to provide nitrogen for crop production when collected through ecological sanitation toilets. Local communities apply urine fertiliser in liquid form for crop production, displacing chemical fertilisers. However, the liquid form suffers high nitrogen losses through leaching and volatilisation in sand-dominated soils of Malawi, and the strong, unpleasant odour discourages the use of urine fertiliser among smallholder farmers. Despite the rich nitrogen content of urine fertiliser for crop production, developing granulated urine-based fertiliser for maise production in Malawi's sand-dominated fields has received little attention. Granular fertilisers are generally a better choice because they retain nutrients, encourage root development, and provide long-lasting benefits. The creation of granulated urine fertilisers will reduce the unpleasant odours.

The project aims to create and test granular fertilisers as an affordable alternative to chemical fertilisers, enabling marginalised groups affected by cyclones to continue growing crops. This initiative seeks to alleviate poverty and uphold food security. Dr Nyengere's study will analyse the efficacy of granulated urine fertiliser on maise performance and train farmers to prepare and use urine fertiliser for maise production in marginalised communities. The project will utilise locally mined special rock elements to develop granular urine fertilisers. The rocks will be crushed into a fine powder using a rock crusher before being calcined in a specialised furnace. After the granular fertilisers are made, tests will be conducted on maise fields to assess how well the maise grows after the new granular fertiliser is applied. Dr Nyengere will collect urine from developed ecosan toilets and modified urinals at the Malawi University of Science and Technology.

The experiment will use a randomised complete block design on a 13.5 m2 plot with six ridges and 12 planting stations. Maise seeds will be planted with four treatments: control, chemical fertiliser (CF), granulated urine, and liquid urine. The treatments will be replicated three times. Hybrid maise seeds will be used as a test crop due to their nitrogen response and importance as a staple food in Malawi. Soil samplings will be conducted at every treatment to measure nitrogen availability in the soil before planting, after top-dressing fertiliser application, and at harvest. Samples will be sieved and analysed for particle size distribution and chemical properties. Plant height and nutrient uptake will be measured 31-77 days after planting and harvest.

Aboveground biomass will be calculated after harvesting. Air-dried samples will be oven-dried independently, and total carbon and nitrogen content will be measured. The nutrient uptake, apparent recovery efficiency, and agronomic use efficiency will be calculated to estimate the nutrient levels in the crop against the total nitrogen applied per treatment. Statistical analyses will be conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics 20 (IBM, USA) for analysis of variance (ANOVA). All treatment means will be compared using Tukey's multiple range test to test the influence of granulated urine fertiliser compared with liquid urine and CF.

Jabulani Nyengere, a lecturer in geoinformatics at the Malawi University of Science and Technology, holds a PhD in Global Environmental Studies (with a focus on geoinformatics) from Kyoto University, Japan. He also has a Master of Science in Geography from Chancellor College, with a major in Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing. His areas of specialisation range from geospatial machine learning and modelling to advanced remote sensing, spatial statistics, and analysis. Dr Nyengere has worked on various GIS and remote sensing research projects, including geospatial soil heterogeneity, machine learning modelling and prediction for forest cover loss in Malawi, geospatial systems development, and GIS network analysis for fish trade flows in Africa. Currently, he is leading a project to develop and upscale granulated rock-blended urine fertiliser suitable for Malawi's heterogeneous soils.