Grant Work | Visual Story Editing | Project Management: The Power of Poo

I ideated, proposed, won an International Women’s Media Foundation grant, and executed as part of a team of producers and journalists all parts of this project focusing on an NGO effort to mitigate the effects of wood-burning and deforestation in rural parts of Rwanda by arming the local population with biogas digesters, which was published by Yahoo News and awarded by TED’s Visualizing Climate Change initiative. (As part of the same collaborative effort, I also published a photo story in National Geographic on dogs' newly therapeutic role in Kigali.) 

- The Power of Poo 

Nearly half of all Rwandans live in poverty, relying on small-scale farming for survival without gas or electricity. With so many of its people spending hours of the day foraging for wood used for cooking and light, often damaging their eyes, lungs, the forests and atmosphere, a little inventiveness helps. Enter cow and enter pig — not just as a source of food, but also the heat needed to cook it. Or more specifically, their poo — the fuel fed to a biogas digester, a tank that converts organic waste into methane.