RAID WA Networking Event – 19 July 2023

On 19 July 2023, RAID WA hosted a networking lunch at the University of Western Australia (UWA). The event attracted approximately 20 people, with a large portion of attendees international students who were currently undertaking their masters and PhD studies at UWA.

Dr Peter Batt and David Collins were the guest speakers and provided a wonderful overview of their international development work that had been made possible in part by funding from Crawford.

Dr Peter Batt is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Australia, and his work focuses on agribusiness marketing.

Peter has been involved in the development and delivery of a fresh vegetable marketing short course to growers in Cambodia. Over four days the course provides participants with an overview of marketing concepts, including product quality, pricing strategies, and distribution, as well as a focus on identifying market needs and how growers could differentiate their product to better suit the market.

An additional component of the course was to ensure growers were keeping accurate records of their businesses, allowing them to understand the costs and better ensure long-term sustainability.

David Collins, who works for Boola Boornap Nursery and previously Greening Australia, in collaboration with Dr Innocent Muhereza and Dr Deb Pritchard, has delivered soil fertility training to leading farmers in Uganda in four separate trips from 2012-2019.

Dr Innocent Muhereza, being from Uganda, has provided a strong link to growers and enabled an easy transfer of information, allowing for uptake and practice change.

The soil fertility training has predominately revolved around nitrogen as soil testing has found that to be the limiting nutrient within many of the Ugandan grower’s soils. Lime has also become a focus of more recent trial work.

A major highlight of this work for David has been seeing the growers, who are predominately women, not only generate higher crop yields and provide more food for their families, but also the ability to produce excess food to sell at market, generating an additional income stream.

David stressed that the project has been successful because they were able to connect directly to landholders through Dr Muhereza’s network and this lead on to a lovely discussion prompted by Professor Lyn Abbott.

Lyn emphasised that students who are interested in research for international development could be involved in many ways and those that are international students from developing nations provide valuable links and knowledge of international development work that could really benefit their home country.