Page 11 - UNAM’s National Capstone Contributions

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Ogongo Rice Production

Future Plans

• Further Bush-clearing of 1.5 hectares for more rice expansion
• Continue steady expansion annually to increase yield
• Develop and commercialize new foods and by-products from rice

Transformation of Communities through Research and Innovation
The University of Namibia strives to improve the socio-economic
livelihoods of the Namibian people through its cutting-edge research
and innovation outputs. This is evident from previous successful projects UNAM had undertaken in the past
like the research on suitable rice varieties planted at Kalimbeza Rice Farm, which was later introduced
at Ogongo Campus) under the partnership with the Japanese International Cooperation (JIC), and
Japan Science and Technology (JST). This partnership has extended its services to the communities
around the Ogongo Constituency and surrounding areas. Communities living in the Zambezi, Kavango
West, and Kavango East Regions were trained on value addition and sustainable harvesting of these
underutilised Namibian indigenous fruits and vegetables indigenous fruits and vegetables.

For more information, please contact:
Dr Christopher Mberema
Email: cmberema@unam.na
( +264 65-223 5201 or
Dr John Sifani, Email: jsifani@unam.na
( +264 61 206 3466

HESS Project

Namibia, increasingly a popular destination for world
leading astronomic observations
The world’s leading gamma-ray observatory, the High Energy
Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) is used for detecting gamma
rays that carry more than a billion times the energy of visible
light; probing the most violent places in the Universe, including
black holes, neutron stars, and supernova remnants. Over
the years, successful endeavours, like the H.E.S.S. Project,
have helped Namibia attract other large scale collaborative
projects to Namibia. Recent examples of other large scale astronomical projects that have considered Namibia as host
country, include the Cherenkov Telescope Array, the Square Kilometer Array, and the Africa Millimeter Telescope. The
latter two have chosen Namibia as their future host. Head of the Namibian H.E.S.S. group, is Associate Prof Michael Backes
from the UNAM Faculty of Science, Physics’ Department. UNAM students and staff are actively involved in developing the
science behind these telescopes, while enhancing human capital development in Astronomy and related technologies
such as, ultra-fast electronics and computing in fields of Machine Learning and Big Data.

For enhancing Big Data and local High-Performance Computing (HPC) capacities, UNAM received large storage
servers from other H.E.S.S. member institutes. These will be integrated in the HPC cluster at UNAM, which is administered
by the Virtual Institute for Scientific Computing and
Artificial Intelligence.The expenses of maintaining the
H.E.S.S. project are more than justified by the scientific For more information, please contact:
productivity of this collaboration, currently consisting Assoc. Prof Michael Backes
of over 40 institutions from over 13 countries. H.E.S.S. Email: mbackes@unam.na
customarily publishes ground-breaking findings in highly ( +264 61 206 3789
prestigious journals, like Nature or Science, biannually.

UNAM Projects Addressing National Priority Areas