An Egyptian female engineer has devised a small unit for treating agricultural wastewater and recycling it for irrigation, which may help mitigate the country's perennial water shortage.

According to a report published by the United Nations on May 4, Sarah Abdelkader, an environmental health PhD student at the Institute of Global Health and Human Ecology of the American University of Cairo, won the prestigious L'Oréal-UNESCO Young Talented Scientist award for her research.

In an interview with Al-Monitor, Abdelkader explained, “The project is an onsite and mobile treatment unit for agricultural drainage water that can be placed directly in sewage systems rather than treatment plants and moved from one agricultural land to another easily. Farmers routinely re-use agricultural wastewater, which is often polluted with municipal and industrial waste, especially in places that do not have a good irrigation network.”

Because the unit can be placed in the drain, she said, "it saves farmers the high costs and lengthy process of wastewater going through treatment units.”