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PROVO — More than 8,700 miles away from Provo, a lake in Uganda is no longer infested with weeds because of the help of some BYU professors.
In May 2019, BYU faculty librarians Quinn Galbraith and Andy Spackman took seven students to Uganda as part of an international development course where they met with nonprofits and communities in need. The group's driver and guide, Godfrey Lufafa, took the group to a remote village four hours northeast of the capital Kampala.
When they arrived, Galbraith said they could see a beautiful massive green meadow spanning across their view. That meadow, however, was actually a massive lake that was so overgrown with a non-native, invasive species you couldn't even see the water.
"It was so thick you could almost walk on it," Galbraith said.
Lake Nakuwa was crucial to the economic and physical well-being of the community: it provided food, transportation, water and a source of commerce with farming communities. Without the lake, Lufafa said almost 10,000 people didn't know how their families were going to survive.
"These villages — dozens of them — that relied on the lake for fishing, had all given up," Galbraith said. "It was devastating."
The weeds also were affecting the lake and the surrounding environment's ecosystem. Lufafa had been researching the shoebill stork — a significant bird that used to nest near the lake but had been driven off since the infestation.
The villagers tried everything to get rid of the weed, but every time they hauled plants out to the shore, the plants multiplied and filled in the gaps within days.
Being a lake about 2 miles wide and 8 miles long, it was impossible to get the lake fully cleaned.
"Many people say they have never done anything else apart from fishing," Lufafa told Galbraith. "Fishing is the only thing they know. But when this thing covered the lake ... everybody was affected."
The village leaders asked the BYU group if they could help devise a solution to eradicate the weed.
Galbraith and Spackman contacted the BYU plant and wildlife sciences librarian Mike Goates who connected them with Russell Rader, a professor of aquatic ecology. Rader researched the weed Salvinia molesta and discovered a small weevil native to Brazil can effectively control the plant's spread.
Through connections that spanned all the way to Australia, South Africa, then back to Uganda, Rader learned a few other communities in Africa were successfully using the beetle to fight the Salvinia molesta populations. He worked with Lufafa to connect him with local organizations to bring this solution to Lake Nakuwa.
Lufafa's nonprofit, Generation Root Foundation, worked with the National Agricultural Research Organization to get a weevil-breeding facility and weevils in September 2019. The breeding facility was similar to a small pool where they put some of the weeds in to infest them with the weevils.
Once the plants were infested, they put them back in the lake and slowly, the weevils spread, eating the invasive plants.
"Little by little, we started seeing a miracle happening," Lufafa said.
A second breeding facility was built at a different area of the lake in January 2020. This one was a stone cistern funded by a $700 donation from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in South Africa.
And sure enough, the lake started clearing.
By December 2020, the lake was free of the weed that had plagued it for almost five years.
"People were very happy when they saw that they could go back and fish," Lufafa said in an interview with Galbraith.
Lufafa said people had abandoned hope and let their boats rot because they thought their lake would never be clean again, but now people tell him they were saved.
Smaller lakes near Lake Nakuwa had also become infested with the weed, but Lufafa and his team were able to help clean those lakes with the weevils too.
The professors, students and librarians at BYU didn't know their advice helped the lake become a success until Galbraith visited Uganda again in April 2023 after he spoke at an academic conference in Kenya.
"It was one of those things where none of us expected anything. I passed a piece of advice on, and I didn't expect it to change people's lives," Galbraith said. "Now a few years later, it's been cleared and it's a beautiful thriving lake."
During Galbraith's visit, he canoed the lake, photographed the transformation and met with villagers who were catching massive amounts of large fish in the lake.
"It wasn't a huge effort on BYU," Galbraith said. "Sometimes these small things can have a huge impact. We felt like it was divine intervention in all of it."
The shoebill storks Lufafa had been looking for, eventually returned to the lake, which he was very happy about. But his work to help communities with conservation and environmental issues hasn't stopped.
Generation Root Foundation does outreach programs to school kids to teach them how to connect with nature and understand the importance of conservation.
"We feel that helping them to learn and love to appreciate nature when they are young will help them when they are older to want to protect, preserve and conserve nature," Lufafa said.
With these outreach programs, the nonprofit plants fruit trees at schools for the children to take care of and to harvest fruit from.
