Challenge to save lives in Cambodia
Portia Thompson detonating a UXO.
Two weeks into her first full-time job, Waikato graduate Portia Thompson had the chance to go to Cambodia with her former uni lecturer to help develop a national strategic plan for removing landmines and unexploded bombs. It was an opportunity too good to pass up, and luckily her employer Beca said yes to her request for leave.
Portia has a Bachelor of Management Studies (Hons) from the University of Waikato, with strategic management and economics majors. She works as a management consultant for Beca in Hamilton.
She had some idea what to expect in Cambodia, because her economics lecturer Dr Steven Lim had often talked about the clearance work he'd been doing over the years with the Cambodian government and CMAC, the Cambodian Mine Action Centre, and he'd used examples of his work in student case studies.
Then, having got the all clear to go, Portia did as much research as she could. Cambodia has one of largest landmine and explosive remnants of war (ERW) contaminations in the world, including unexploded bombs, shells, rockets, and grenades.
The Cambodian government and a network of development partners are working to rid the country of landmines and ERW by 2025.
Dr Lim and Portia's work was focussed on developing the national strategy for landmine clearance to 2025. This involved a week of research and interviews based out of CMAC headquarters in Phnom Penh, followed by a week of field work visiting minefields in Siem Reap Province and cluster-bomb- contaminated farmland in Kampong Cham Province.
Portia says clearing an area of landmines not only means a reduction in deaths and injuries, it frees up land for production and infrastructure. There are millions of mines and demining is a competitive business as different organisations apply for funding.
"The re-prioritising to clear low-density first was one of our key recommendations that resulted from the trip," she says. "Due to the highly competitive funding environment, de-mining organisations have typically always competed based on number of landmines cleared, which incentivised clearing high-density areas first. By shifting the metric conveyed to funders to focus on land area cleared, or lives impacted, this enables de-mining efforts to have a bigger impact on Cambodian communities. This was one of the big strategic shifts we recommended."
It makes economic sense to prioritise areas, and it's often low density clearing that has the biggest impact on improving livelihoods and economic growth. "If you can clear an area, and cut a road, it can allow people to get to a common place of work, or cut down travel time getting products to market. We saw examples of this where travel time had once taken two days but now takes two hours," Portia says.
Locals have got so used to mines and UXOs (unexploded ordinances), that children will usually know exactly where it is safe or unsafe to play, or where not to go as they make their way through minefields to school. "That was eye-opening, to see how they'd adapted to their situation," Portia says.
She also visited Apopo, an organisation that trains rats to use scent to detect mines. "The rats are incredible, because they're too light to detonate the mines, and they detect TNT rather than metal, so they're more efficient than a human with a metal detector. This was one of the highlights of my trip. "And I got to detonate four explosives, a combination of landmines and unexploded ordinates, got to hit the big red button. The explosion was huge."
Back home and back into work, Portia is doing business case writing, programme planning and some environmental economics. She's getting plenty of variety in her work and says strategic management and economics is a good combination, allowing her to cover many different aspects of a project.
The former Aquinas College student says coming to Waikato was a last-minute decision, but one of the best choices she's made.
"Two weeks before uni started, I was all set to go to Otago to study health sciences, but then I changed my mind and I'm really glad I did," she says.
Portia competed in Waikato Management School case competitions and successes there saw her competing against other New Zealand universities and going to the USA, Australia and Japan for student competitions. And she's still in touch with the University of Waikato, coaching a case competition team, and working with Dr Lim as a research assistant on a new economics paper.
Beware the zombie river
The University of Waikato's longest serving Chancellor is retiring
Budding young lawyers moot their way to the top
Ethan's our new poster boy
Professor awarded $1.1m research grant for child concussion study
Learning to discriminate: Can machines learn to identify pest species from photos?
Torutek, truly a Waikato business
How toddlers communicate without words
NAISA and sunshine
A call for change in voluntary unionism
This content is free to reuse
Challenge to save lives in Cambodia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Academics suggest a union default, enacted in law, will help address rising income inequality.
Historic gathering of Indigenous experts
The Native American and Indigenous Studies Association has started in Hamilton, with a record number…
University of Waikato climbs international rankings
For the sixth year running, the University of Waikato has climbed up the QS World…
The sun will shine on graduation day for Watene Moon
Popular student ambassador and current Te Tohu Paetahi student, Watene Moon graduates today with a…
Navigating university with purple-tinted glasses
Nataalia Lunson graduates today with a Bachelor of Science in Applied Biology from the University…
Rainbow warrior set to graduate at new Tauranga campus
LGBTQ advocate, Waikato Students' Union student support coordinator, and confirmed TEDx speaker, Kat Clark graduates…
Queen's Birthday Honours for staff, stakeholders and alumni
A psychology professor, Council member and former associate professor of law are among members of…
A new era of graduation for Tauranga
The University of Waikato is about to hold its first graduation at the new Tauranga…
Waikato students win big at NZ Startup Bootcamp
Two University of Waikato teams came out on top of the NZ Startup Bootcamp, each…
The Entrepreneurial Inmate
The University of Waikato is giving inmates at the country's biggest women's prison the chance…
Building a new knowledge base in the Pacific
Masters' graduate Riby Tupiti taking a lot of learning from both inside and outside the…
Getting bang for buck from business analytics
At a free public lecture on Tuesday 21 May, Professor Rajeev Sharma of Waikato Management…