PhD proposal thoughts

My PhD proposal presentation took place at the end of November last year. After Christmas and New Year back home in Zimbabwe, I came back to UCT, only to leave South Africa again in a few weeks. I traveled with Thabi to Kampala, Uganda for a specialist workshop which focused on small scale biogas in Africa. The workshop was extremely insightful and I was able to save weeks of literature reviewing by chatting to technical experts in different fields of biogas research. I used some of the free-time to reflect on the focus of my PhD and streamline the ideas in my written proposal. Now that I have received some official feedback on my written draft, I am working on the key hypothesis and deciding what to place emphasis on. As it stands, I have decided that the aims of my research are to improve the understanding of small scale biogas technology in urban Africa. I will be studying the 'deployability' of biogas technology with a focus on stability and productivity of such systems, coming from an urban energisation angle, with the additional benefits of sanitation and waste management. As I will be working in an urban domain, I will employ remote monitoring as a tool for data collection and quick response analysis. My second draft is due at the end of this month (March) so that's what I will be working on for the time being.