WYOMISSING, Pa. — As part of the SustainFood Project, Penn State Berks will host a webinar on innovation and entrepreneurship for food security from 8 to 9 a.m., Monday, March 27. This webinar is free and open to the public, but attendees must register in advance.
Khanjan Mehta, vice provost for creative inquiry and director of the Mountaintop Initiative at Lehigh University, will give a talk titled “Affordable Greenhouses: A 10-Year Journey from Inquiry to Sustainable Impact.” The talk will focus on practical lessons that technology innovators and social entrepreneurs can use to transform food systems in low-resource areas.
Mehta’s talk is based on the work of a group of undergraduate students who set out to build affordable greenhouses in 2009 at the requests of farmers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and research institutes in East Africa. A mentor of theirs set a goal for them to design a greenhouse that could be assembled by two people in two days for less than $200 with a lifespan of at least five years. The students got to work and embarked on a 10-year journey building sustainable greenhouse ventures in Kenya, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Cambodia, and other countries.
For more information about the webinar, contact Abdullah Konak, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology, at [email protected].
About SustainFood Project
The SustainFood Project provides a collaborative platform that promotes food security through linking, building, and accelerating international, transdisciplinary teams of researchers, students and practitioners across the U.S., African, and European networks that provide sustainable solutions using the WEF Nexus. This is achieved through network-to-network research, education, and community outreach activities.
