Revolutionizing agriculture in MENA: Tackling a water crisis and pollution with innovation

The SafeAgroMENA project is looking for ways to reduce these risks and stimulate food self-sufficiency for small-scale farmers. Spread across Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and the Netherlands, the project team brings together people from academia, non-governmental and governmental organizations.

With the use of agro-ecological interventions, the project team aims to mitigate potential risks of gene mutation, endocrine disruption and the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria – all to avert that a pandemic is unleashed by micropollutants. Agro-ecological interventions are bottom-up territorial approaches developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) that support the local solutions to local problems.

Teach me how to get water and I will plant the hills

IHE Delft researcher Hadeel Hosney leads the SafeAgroMENA project’s multidisciplinary team. The programme seeks to promote leadership by underrepresented groups in the water sector, and Hosney, a young Egyptian postdoc, is showing the way. 

“I have encountered a range of challenges in my role stemming from a combination of factors such as my gender, age and nationality,” said Hosney, noting that many in the team initially challenged her inputs. To address this, she set up a management committee that includes the more experienced members in the team to serve as both a sounding board and a bridge to the skeptics.  

Based out of Delft, every chance she gets Hosney visits the project locations and never passed on the opportunity to chat and share a meal with the farmers. “What makes me happy is the chance to connect with the farmers, get to know their difficulties, learn from their resilience. Once, when we were outlining the challenges, a Jordanian farmer said, ‘teach me how to get water, and I will plant the hills,’” she said.

Discovering a common language

The project research is informed by ethics and methodologies from both natural and social sciences. For example, before the team members collect samples of wastewater for testing, they do a participatory mapping of the community and conduct focus group discussions to build trust and learn.

This interdisciplinary collaboration has already led to some key insights, said Ahmed Atia Rezk, a project team member in SafeAgroMENA and the BENAA foundation in Egypt. “Critical inquiry rooted in social sciences offers a helpful perspective,” he said. 

Rezk, who handles the monitoring and evaluation of the project, has a background in engineering, architecture and human geography. His combination of in-depth expertise combined with a rich reservoir of multidisciplinary experience is typical for the 12-member project team.  This results in an exciting convergence of very different ideas, Hosney said.

“We are pushing boundaries of interdisciplinary collaboration and slowly discovering a common language,” she said, emphasizing that this makes open and clear communication in the team important.

Monitoring and evaluation needs to be a living process

A project of this scale with a vast geographic and administrative expanse cannot operate with fixed goals and static monitoring strategies. Rezk is building a monitoring and evaluation strategy for the project that lead to concerted action while allowing each partner to work at their own pace.

“There are so many activities taking place at different levels and partners often move at different pace. What we have come to realize is that we need a fluid theory of change that is representative of these dynamics between activities and results,” he said.

Ayat Hazaymeh, team member and senior studies specialist at the Royal Scientific Society, Jordan added:

“There’s often a dance between expectations and reality with mounting variables, reporting obligations and a fixed timeline. But with partners from different backgrounds and countries, where one lags, the other leads – allowing us to stay flexible while moving ahead.”

Cultivating change

In MENA’s arid landscapes, where water scarcity has long been a formidable challenge, a new chapter of hope is being written. The SafeAgroMENA project shows in practice how solutions to global challenges can be pursued with not only knowledge, but also compassion, ingenuity and the courage to step into the unknown.

Supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Water and Development Partnership Programme brings together more such inter-and trans-disciplinary teams to find sustainable solutions to water challenges, redress injustices and enrich the knowledge on water.