Implementation of Sustainable Integrated Aquaculture, Aquaponic, and Hydroponic Systems for Egypt's Western Desert Through Global Community Engaged Research

This paper presents an international student internship collaboration between Princeton University and the American University in Cairo.The participatory project addresses the need to design and test affordable renewable energy solutions for community based, circular farming models, enhancing food production while saving resources.Students partnered to study aquaponic and hydroponic growing systems and to construct a solar-powered, integrated aquaculture and vegetable greenhouse system for a real-life oasis community in Egypt's Western Desert.The greenhouse-based solution was tailored to match the capacity of a mechanical wind pump built and tested by a previous internship cohort in 2018 and further developed in a senior thesis project at Princeton University.Participating students worked with faculty internship supervisors, experts, and engineers in Egypt who implemented the system with local farmers.Students remained engaged in fieldwork through online meetings, updates from on-site, recorded interviews with local farmers and time lapse videos.In addition, students received solar-powered hydroponics and aquaponics kits, which they built and tested by growing plants of their choice.This home experiment gave students practical engineering experience and a perspective on the challenges of intensive, circular growing.An app was developed for recording data including water consumption, water quality, plant, and fish growth.Students met regularly during the internship via Zoom and participated in lectures, debates, group work, social games and cultural exchanges, in addition to supporting the installation in the Western Desert and getting their in-home kits working.Integrating online learning with hands-on experiential learning and real life, communitybased engineering challenges facilitated international internship experiences without physical travel.Student experiences were evaluated through feedback forms and compared to the 2018 inperson version of the program.The impact on the community is evaluated qualitatively through interviews and quantitatively when data is available. BackgroundThis international engineering internship addressed fundamental engineering challenges linked to the sustainability of ecosystems, societies, and economies, and thus topics the global community should address through concerted action.Eliminating global hunger and ensuring food security, particular in low and medium-income countries, is a core objective of the Sustainable Development Goals.Feeding growing populations requires a substantial increase in global food production.As the bulk of global population growth occurs in developing countries, the enhancing of food production is often restricted by poverty, limited access to technology, or a lack of knowledge or capacity.Egypt's population of around 100 million [1] grows by a further million every 6-10 months, while the country is classified as vulnerable to food security, with challenges in food affordability, quality, and safety, as well as malnutrition and stunting [2].Egypt is already the largest wheat importer in the world, as imports cover over 50% of the demand for wheat and other staple crops [3,4].