Cultivating tomorrow – a student awardee’s work in photos

Manita Raut, who is on RAID’s central committee, is one of 17 students who received a Crawford Fund 2023 student award. The Crawford Fund first connected with Manita back in 2017 when the Fund supported an ABC TV Landline visit to Nepal for their Food Security Journalism Award winner, Sean Murphy, and Manita was interviewed on an ACIAR-International Water Management Institute (IWMI) project in which she was involved.  Manita is now a Ph.D. researcher and an ACIAR John Allwright Fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Her student award sees her in Nepal doing research fieldwork on “Irrigation Technology Adoption: Water Use and Practices by Marginalized and Tenant Farmers in Nepal.”

Manita is currently conducting comprehensive fieldwork in Nepal to unravel the intricate relationships between smallholder farmers, water resources, and innovative technologies.

Enriched by her background in natural resource management and six-year research work at IWMI, Manita adopts an interdiscipilnary approach in her scholarly pursuits. Committed to gender equality and inclusive water governance and her exploration of irrigation practices is designed to uplift marginalised farming communities’ livelihoods, showcasing her belief in research’s transformative potential.

She has provided this photo-story of her time so far in Nepal.