While South Africa battles one of the worst droughts in its history, a 16-year-old girl from Johannesburg may have just cracked a low-cost, home-grown solution… using nothing but orange peels and avocado skins.
Johannesburg, South Africa (10 August 2016) – While most 16-year-olds are navigating school exams and weekend plans, Johannesburg’s Kiara Nirghin has been busy working on something a little more… world-changing.
Faced with South Africa’s worst drought in recorded history, with eight of our nine provinces declared disaster zones, Kiara looked at the crisis and asked herself one simple question: what can I do to help?
The answer? A revolutionary invention made from orange peels and avocado skins that could quite literally save crops, support farmers, and turn food waste into a drought-fighting superhero.
This young science prodigy, a student at St. Martin’s School, created a biodegradable super-absorbent polymer (SAP) that can store hundreds of times its own weight in water. It acts like a mini reservoir, helping keep crops alive — even in dry, unforgiving soil — and it’s made from things we usually throw away.
“I wanted to minimise the effect that drought has on the community, and the main thing it affects is the crops,” Kiara explained.
With trial and error (and a whole lot of curiosity), she discovered that orange peels are packed with polysaccharides — the same molecule found in many synthetic SAPs — and also contain pectin, a natural gelling agent. Combined with oil-rich avocado skins and a little sunlight, Kiara created a cost-effective, natural solution to one of our country’s biggest environmental challenges.
The best part? It’s not just affordable. It’s sustainable. It’s home-grown. And it could be scaled to help communities across the country.
The innovation caught the attention of the Google Science Fair, where Kiara was named a regional winner and assigned a mentor from Google to help develop her idea further. She now stands a chance to be one of the tech giant’s sixteen global finalists.
“Kiara found an ideal material that won’t hurt the budget in simple orange peel, and through her research, she created a way to turn it into soil-ready water storage with help from the avocado,” said Andrea Cohan, the fair’s programme leader.
Experts are already impressed. Dr Jinwen Zhang, a professor of materials engineering who works on hydrogels for drought, called the concept “definitely worth further investigation.”
But this isn’t just a once-off experiment for Kiara. Her dreams are big. She’s already talking about testing the polymer on key crops like maize and wheat in rural communities. And when she’s not thinking about agriculture, she’s dreaming up new ways to dye the skins of endangered animals to prevent poaching.
She credits her inspiration to the legendary Indian agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan, and says her future could include anything from health sciences to engineering — “something so I can improve the world.”
Kiara’s journey is a shining example of what happens when creativity meets compassion. And while the drought has brought a great deal of heartache, it’s also brought out the brilliance of young minds like hers… proving yet again that the future is in good hands.
Because sometimes, the smallest idea — even one that starts in your kitchen — can grow into something that helps feed a nation.
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DRiWATER is another tremendous water saver