A woman by a maize field. Photo.
Chantal Uwituze at a field with maize intercropped with Desmodium -a repellent plant used in push-pull cropping systems

Chantal is making crop production more sustainable in Rwanda

News published:  24/11/2025

“Sweden is opening my eyes from different angles,” says Chantal Uwituze, a PhD student from the University of Rwanda currently visiting SLU. Her research focuses on how Rwanda’s crop intensification program can become more sustainable – both for people and the planet.

For years, Chantal Uwituze has been dedicated to support farmers and agricultural development in Rwanda. Before starting her PhD, she worked as a laboratory technician and lecturer at the University of Rwanda’s College of Agriculture, Animal Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate students the practical aspects of soil and plant analysis.

– I worked with researchers and students to support their laboratory projects, and I also did consultancies for different agricultural companies, analyzing soil and fertilizer samples. Through this experience, I began to see gaps in agricultural production and wanted to contribute to sustainable food systems in my country, says Chantal.

Motivated by this goal and supported by Sida’s UR–Sweden Program, Chantal embarked on a PhD journey that now brings her to SLU where she will be visiting until mid December.

 

Close up of two different crop species growing together. Photo.
: Maize plot colonized by Striga weed. Striga is a genus of parasitic plants, commonly known as witchweed, that severely affects cereal crops in sub-Saharan Africa.

Assessing Rwanda’s crop intensification program

Two and a half years into her PhD, Chantal is studying Rwanda’s national Crop Intensification Program (CIP), a key initiative aimed at improving agricultural productivity and food security. Her research focuses on evaluating the program’s environmental impact and its effectiveness in managing pests, weeds, and soil nutrients.

Currently, she is visiting SLU to work with her supervisors  Mattias Jonsson and Cassandra Vogel to analyze data from her field experiments and to write scientific papers that will form part of her PhD thesis.

She compares control of weeds, pests, improvement of soil fertility, effects on yield and impacts on biodiversity and environmental contamination.

A woman in front of high grass. Photo.
Chantal by napier grass planted around cereal crops. Napier grass attracts pests such as stem borers. However, when stem borers lay eggs on Napier grass, the larvae often fail to survive, effectively reducing pest pressure on the main crop.

Shaping farming practices in Rwanda

Chantal says her time at SLU has been eye-opening.

– Sweden is advanced in many ways, and I am learning a lot. I really appreciate how the university connects research to real-world applications. The community here is very open, and I have attended several seminars that showed me how well-organized and collaborative research can be. I hope to see my home university develop in the same direction.

Chantal’s goal is to help shape farming practices in Rwanda that are both productive and kind to the environment.

– I want my research to matter beyond the lab, to support farmers and make agriculture more resilient, she says.

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