Vétérinaires Sans Frontières is an NGO that operates in East Africa. They support pastoral communities through various projects, such as training animal health workers, who travel through local communities helping to both detect common diseases, and vaccinate against them. Another example is improving food hygiene, by providing aluminum cans to store milk. For more, go to their website

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) hosts the prestigious ”Green Talents – International Forum for High Potentials in Sustainable Development” to promote the international exchange of innovative green ideas. The winners come from numerous countries and scientific disciplines and are recognised for their outstanding achievements in making our societies more sustainable.

According to project coordinator Julia Kirschner, winning the Green Talents Award means you are invited with the other 24 recipients to Germany to attend the Green Talents Science Forum. You do not only get a chance to travel around Germany, but the chance to visit three experts of your choice. A year later you can arrange to have a research stay for three months at the institution of your choice.

A recipient of the award in 2016, Hèou Maléki Badjana from Togo shares his thoughts and experiences in the video below.

If you are interested in the Green Talents Competition 2018 please register for their Competition Alert and you will be informed as soon as the next submission period starts.

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A guided tour through some of the poster presentations on the first day of Tropentag 2017.

The Hans Hartwig Ruthenberg Graduate Award is given to the promising young scientist who work for improving the farming system and constantly fight for hunger. This year Ulrike and Sarah were honored.

Ulrike Beukert

How will we feed the growing population and high demand of rice in the future? For a long time, plant breeding has been popular answer to this question. However, flat results and high use of resources is a growing challenge. Ulrike Beukert, Plant Breeding student from Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg has a new approach to rice breeding. Her research on “Genome-based identification of heterotic patterns in rice,” used only small selection of hybrid to predict the entire parent-line. Applying bio-statistic analysis of yield and gene marker data, she can increase the prediction accuracy and improve yield.

Fadli is studying Agricultural Science and Resources Management in the Tropics and Subtropics at the University of Bonn. Last year he was also a student reporter, and found it fun and wanted to do it again-so he did. “The Tropentag conference itself is a big conference, and an opportunity to discuss with a variety of people from a range of expertise”, he said. He hopes to earn a deeper understanding of blogging and managing the team, now as chief editor. He hopes to catch some of the presented topics at the Tropentag 2017. This year at the conference, he would like to learn more about organic agriculture.

Meet Liz from Nairobi! Liz is from Nairobi, Kenya. She is a PhD student in Agricultural Science at the University of Bonn. She is currently working on “Edible Insects in Kenya” for her research project at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), Kenya. The student reporter call posted on the Tropentag website caught her attention as she was registering to present a poster. She went for it. Even if it meant more work, her acceptance was exciting. This would be a starting point for her path towards a potential career in science communication. Liz flew in from Nairobi expecting to meet people, learn new skills in photography, blogging and editing and, most importantly, have fun. She has interests in entomology, agrobiodiversity and nutritional diversity.