Catherine Nakalembe

Field buddies, for sure.

But what worries me, I think, right now is there are huge challenges for earth science, per se, which is being able to do my work the way I think it should be done through connections like ground-based innovation that then links to the most sophisticated workflows is harder and harder.

Funding to do the probes in the ground, I call it root census, like we sense what's at the root to figure out what will happen in the weeks to come.

It's something that for me, in my perspective, is like amazing.

It should just happen.

But unfortunately, it's so complicated to do it.

And so trying to figure out how to continue to do my work in the current context is very hard.

The pathways I used to be able to do capacity building have basically shut down.

One of the things I do, I call them crop monitor champions.

I do these learning exchanges, have people from different ministries.

We meet in one country.

The country's the priority.

We focus on their monitoring, help them kind of get up to speed, and then others learn and share from their experiences.

And I was doing them as rotational, and they're amazing.

It is not possible to do that anymore.

Yes, we can do things on Zoom, but the connection and the problem solving and the generosity that happens when we're in rooms with people is very different.

That everybody walks away empowered.

And what I love to do in these particular sessions is I get the countries that have done something to present it from their perspective and what they were able to do.

Because it's easy for me to say you can do X, Y, Z. Very different from

how that works when the real person who needs to do it does it.