Leave for Change Burkina Faso – In my four week mandate, I worked as a Control and Quality Assurance Advisor for the National Union of Rice Parboilers (UNERIZ) of Burkina Faso. My mandate entailed identifying critical issues in the rice transformation process, addressing those issues by implementing improved approaches that meet the standard of quality and hygiene in Burkina Faso, and training women on improved processes. This mission required undertaking design tasks and performance analysis, broadening technical knowledge as well as working with communities to determine their technical requirements for improved productivity. This has enabled me to strengthen the capacity of women parboilers for an optimized rice parboiling process in order to ensure a better quality of the rice commercialized.

A restitution workshop was organized at the end of my mandate for adoption of best practices in rice parboiling process. The workshop has gathered women parboilers, technical and financial partners supporting UNERIZ, university researchers, and policy makers. The best practices adopted will enable 3,800 parboilers who are members of UNERIZ to improve the quality of parboiled rice and access more lucrative markets, thus improving their socio-economic conditions. 

This experience has enabled me to grow as an individual while concomitantly providing tools to help others develop. I have gained valuable experience that can translate into an important emerging integrated approach in research for NSCC, bringing together social, cultural and technical areas of expertise. This is particularly important in a context where real-world fieldwork has been the mode of teaching and training in students’ learning experience. This will lead to a better understanding of how our integrated applied research model can stimulate our students’ entrepreneurial skills in developing new products/services that can be sold abroad. This will also increase our students’ understanding that living in a global marketplace means we need to be global actors.

For more information check out Etienne's blog!

Etienne Mfoumou

Research Scientist, Applied Research

NSCC, Waterfront Campus