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Visiting scholar hopes to improve life in Sierra Leone through agriculture education
Joseph Musa, a visiting scholar at the LSU AgCenter, is originally from Sierra Leone. He is studying sweet potatoes at the AgCenter and hopes to use that expertise to help farmers when he returns home. Photo by Olivia McClure/LSU AgCenter LSU AgCenter International Programs director and horticulture professor David Picha, left, is mentoring Joseph Musa, a visiting scholar from Sierra Leone. Photo by Olivia McClure/LSU AgCenter
BATON ROUGE, La. – Agriculture has led Joseph Musa around the world, from his native Sierra Leone to a university in Costa Rica, and most recently to Louisiana, where he is a visiting scholar at the LSU AgCenter. His travels have been in pursuit of education – not only to improve his own life, but to be able to improve the lives of people back home.
Musa, 29, who is originally from Kailahun in eastern Sierra Leone, is studying the effects of postharvest storage on sweet potato nutrition with David Picha, a horticulture professor and director of AgCenter International Programs. Musa plans to enroll in graduate school at LSU in the fall.
“The climate is similar, so I actually don’t miss home too much,” he said with a smile.
But home is often on his mind. After he graduates, Musa wants to return to Sierra Leone to help farmers. Still recovering from a lengthy civil war, the West African country was slammed with an outbreak of Ebola cases in summer 2014 and is now facing an array of economic woes.
The World Health Organization has confirmed more than 8,500 cases of the virus in Sierra Leone, nearly 4,000 of which resulted in deaths.
“It would be hard to get a job there now,” Musa said. “Schools are just now reopening. Rural communities that used to grow foods have been affected by Ebola. Their homes have been quarantined, and people were forced out.”
While Ebola has been destructive, the roots of Sierra Leone’s economic problems go further back.
Sierra Leone once had a robust agriculture sector that supplied European markets with cacao, coffee, bananas, yams, cassava and rice. But a civil war broke out in 1991 and lasted until 2002, bringing commercial farming to a stop, Musa said. Sierra Leone no longer exports rice; it imports it.
“Their homes were devastated,” Musa said of the country’s farmers. “Most of them lost their livelihoods, and then they never returned, so most of them ended up in the city. For them to return back was a big challenge. When they return back, they have to start again from zero.”
Roads have been in such poor condition since the war that farmers sometimes cannot drive to markets to sell their products, Musa said. Many young people now look to the mining industry for work – which means fewer farmers and not enough food.
Musa, however, is optimistic that agriculture education can help solve that problem. Education, in fact, was what first exposed him to the field. In secondary school, Musa took an agriculture course where he did fun gardening projects – and he always got good grades.
That led him to Costa Rica, where he learned to speak Spanish and earned a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from EARTH University. As a third-year student, he traveled home for a project to help train farmers.
“You can create your own job with agriculture,” Musa said. “It is a hands-on field that demands creative thinking.”
Musa’s goal is to start an entrepreneurship program for farmers to help them improve crop production and turn better profits. Because of their high nutritional value, sweet potatoes are one of the most important crops in Sierra Leone, so Musa is looking forward to putting his experience from the AgCenter to use.
“The opportunity to provide training and research opportunities for visiting scholars who represent the next generation of agriculture sector leaders throughout the world is an important contribution of the LSU AgCenter,” Picha said. “Joseph is a diligent, hard-working scholar who has significant potential to positively impact the lives of many in Sierra Leone as the country rebuilds its human resource capacity.”
Susan Karimiha, AgCenter International Programs coordinator, said Musa’s eagerness to learn and share his knowledge with those in need was one reason he was selected as a visiting scholar.
“With our visiting scholar program and students like Joseph, the AgCenter is transforming agriculture throughout the world through training and sustainable human capital development,” Karimiha said.
Musa realizes change in his country will take time and effort, but it is a process he wants to be part of.
“One individual can share knowledge,” Musa said. “It might be a slow pace, but it will get there.”
Olivia McClure
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| Last Updated: 5/5/2015 12:40:52 PM |
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