Internship Information
This summer, the Energy Forum is sending students to Ifni, Morocco to work on a fog-water harvesting project that was initiated by the Si Hmad Derhem Foundation. For the past 4 years, Si Hmad, in conjunction with the University of La Laguna, have been studying the viability of fog collection as a source of water in two sites in Ifni, a region that does not have sufficient supplies of freshwater for domestic and agricultural needs. The water scarcity is more pronounced in the rural areas where there are no water services and residents acquire their water from public wells and private cisterns which collect rain water. During the dry months when wells and/or cisterns are empty, residents are forced to buy water at unaffordable prices, travel long distances in search of water, move their animals to greener pastures or uproot whole families to regions that have sufficient water for their needs.
Fog collection involves setting up mesh screens to trap fog water droplets, which condense on the material and drip down to containers below. Following preliminary trials, one of the sites was abandoned in favor of the second site which had higher water outputs. The interns going to Morocco will assist with further engineering tests of fog collection at the chosen site. In addition, the students will also attend planning sessions with cooperatives which are supported by the Si Hmad and which produce oil from prickly pears and the Argania spinosa, a tree found only in this part of the world. This internship is a great opportunity for the students as it gives them the opportunity to participate in finding solutions to sustainable development problems in developing countries. It also ties in well with the topics that the students explored this semester in the “POST/GLHT411 – Integrated Approaches to Sustainable Development” class, which was sponsored by the Energy Forum, the Center for Civic Engagement and the Rice 360 Institute.
The program will run from June 21, 2010 to July 21, 2010.
