Hello everyone, and thank you Themba for the warm welcome!
My name is Dr. Abdulrahman Tukur Balarabe, a veterinary public health professional and field data specialist based in Kware LGA, Sokoto State, Nigeria — a region sitting within Nigeria's drought- and desertification-prone Sahel corridor.
Over the past eight-plus years I've worked as a field enumerator and community-level data collector across Sokoto State, with organizations including Plan International, the Ministry of Animal Health and Fisheries Development, the Nigerian Red Cross Society, and the Danish Refugee Council/FACT Foundation on a multisectoral needs assessment. My work has focused on disease surveillance, household surveys, and outbreak-response data collection — including anthrax and brucellosis events whose transmission dynamics are shaped by drought, water access, and shifting grazing patterns.
I also spent two years collecting field-level animal and public health data at the Sokoto Modern Abattoir, which gave me a close-up view of how livestock handling, storage, and processing practices intersect with public health risk and environmental sustainability. That experience, paired with my surveillance and agricultural-loss work, has shaped my interest in climate-smart agriculture and improved abattoir practices reducing post-harvest and post-slaughter losses, cutting the environmental footprint of local food systems, and building resilience into how communities in the Sahel produce, store, and process food.
Alongside this fieldwork, I'm the founder of Albasa Naturals, a venture that turns a climate-linked agricultural loss into a local product: roughly 40–50% of Sokoto's onion harvest is lost annually to poor storage, and I'm building an onion-based hair care line that uses this underpriced surplus while supporting local farmer income.
I hold a DVM from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, and I'm nearing completion of an MPH in Epidemiology (Iconic University). I'm fluent in Hausa and English, with strong community access across Sokoto North, Sokoto South, and Kware LGAs.
I'm looking forward to learning from this community and connecting with others working on drought management, climate-smart agriculture, sustainable livestock practices, and land degradation across Africa.