Engineers Without Borders Are Changing The World

In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama describes his visit to a hut in Kenya: "It was a cramped, pitch-black space with a five-foot-high ceiling. The woman told me her family cooked, slept, and kept newborn calves in it. The smoke was blinding, and after a minute I had to leave..." Sometimes the needs of people in developing countries are immediate and immense: a tsunami strikes Indonesia, a drought hits East Africa. But in many villages in the developing world the greatest need is for some mundane piece of technology that we would take for granted in the developed world, like a solar-powered well for an African village with neither electricity nor clean drinking water. Sometimes it's just a stove that doesn't pollute the hut. University of Washington Forest Resources Professor (and civil engineer) Susan Bolton took a team of engineering students to Yanayo, Bolivia, to tackle the stove problem: "After a reconnaissance mission to figure out the engineering problem—creating cheap, locally available stoves and chimney-safe roofs—her team returned for four weeks to complete the job and train residents." Bowen's project, described by Mike Lewis in a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story this spring, was a good example of the work done through a remarkable organization called Engineers Without Borders (EWB). Sustainability is the name of the EWB game: "At any given site...engineers must become clever to build something that can be duplicated and maintained locally." The Borderless Worldview Most people, it seems, have heard of Doctors without Borders. Actually, most people outside the U.S. know it as "Médecins sans Frontiéres", or just MSF. This secular, nongovernmental international humanitarian aid organization provides medical help in over 70 countries, mostly in the developing world, while raising awareness of the plight of the people they help. MSF was founded in 1971 by French doctors and earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. Fewer people are acquainted with Engineers Without Borders. EWB is a younger group, unrelated to, but inspired by, MSF. Like MSF, EWB is a secular, nongovernmental international humanitarian aid organization that mobilizes volunteer professionals to solve critical problems in the developing world. Unlike MSF, EWB is an organization for which you probably meet the membership requirements. (That should be a safe bet, given that you are reading Dr. Dobb's Journal. But if you are one of those orthodontists who subscribed back in the late '80s based on the name and tagline and never cancelled and still pick it up in the waiting room when business is slow, all bets are off.) Not only do you probably fit the EWB profile, we're going to suggest that you might well consider getting involved. Software Marketing Executive Philippe Wagner did. "Great people!" he says, "[A] wonderful organization doing a lot of good to change lives in developing countries around the world. They really care about what they do. Their dedication is only matched by their passion." Wagner decided last year to put together a developer contest and partnered with CMP Technology (Dr. Dobb's parent company at the time) to do it. EWB emerged as "a great fit for the contest," he says. The plan was to have contest participants work on different modules, such as project queries, a GIS query, and reporting, with the goal of addressing as many needs identified by EWB as possible. The contest, for whatever reason, did not come together, but in the process of planning it, Wagner learned a lot about the organization, "and the more I learned the more my enthusiasm...grew." The concept of a world without national borders is one that you, as a software developer, are already familiar with. You doubtless collaborate with programmers or customers in other countries, you interact online with professionals sometimes without knowing what country they're posting from, your business probably has more than a nodding acquaintance with software markets in other countries, even back in school you probably worked on projects in multinational teams. At least within this professional context, you live in the whole world. But we all do: It's just that your work makes you aware of it. EWB recognizes this borderless-world truth and considers the moral and ethical implications. Typically, EWB projects originate in the chapters as proposals. An application review committee vets these proposals, and either approves or declines them. Projects can also be proposed by organizations without any chapter affiliation; if such a proposal is approved, it gets posted to the ESB-USA for adoption by a chapter. Because "potential projects go through a rigorous evaluation process," Wagner points out, "EWB invests time, resources, and money on projects that are not only meaningful but life-changing for the communities/villages that will benefit from their help." Beginnings University of Colorado Professor of Civil Engineering Bernard Amadei found himself in a Mayan village of about 250 people in Belize in April, 2000. He'd been invited to advise on putting in a water-delivery system for the village, which had no running water, sanitation, or electricity. With a team of engineering students and an investment of $14,000, Amadei delivered the goods within about a month, choosing a ram pump as the most efficient, sustainable design under the local conditions. The project "demonstrated the potential of professional and student engineers working together to help a local, underdeveloped community create a sustainable solution," according to the EWB-USA site. The experience "really changed my life," Amadei said. "It was an epiphany, a way for me to realize that engineering was not just technical solutions or providing technical solutions; it had very strong social components." Later that year he founded EWB-USA. Today, the organization has over 200 developing or established chapters, at work on over 170 projects in over 40 countries. Two years later, Amadei cofounded EWB International, a loose group of autonomous organizations with the same goals. And here our story gets a little complicated. At about the same time Amadei was starting EWB-USA, two engineering graduates at the University of Waterloo were sketching out the plan for EWB-Canada on the proverbial napkin. EWB Canada is not part of EWB International but has grown to some 27,000 members on 25 campuses and in five major cities. A similar organization in Quebec, Ingénieries sans Frontiéres Quebec, is not one of EWB Canada's chapters, however. ISFQ was founded in 1994, before EWB-USA or Canada, and it is a member of EWB International. To add to the confusion, other organizations throughout the world also share this name. Fortunately, they all share more or less the same goals. Engineering a Better World This spring, EWB-USA held its 2008 International Conference (www.ewb-usa.org/ConferenceInfo.php) in Seattle. The focus was on sustainable engineering and global health, and the keynote speaker was William Gates II (Bill's dad). Gates spoke on behalf of his son and daughter-in-law's organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (www.gatesfoundation.org). Gates shared some perspective from a Gates Foundation project in which a Nobel Laureate specializing in how people's sense of smell works was able to come up with a malaria control solution based on tricking a mosquito's sense of smell. His point was that this expert in one field applied his expertise to a seemingly unrelated problem in the developing world and—partly because this brought into play questions and thoughts that were new in that context—the result was a truly novel idea. "There are great ideas everywhere," Gates said, "and not everyone has the resources to prove them before they get funded. That especially includes a lot of smart people in developing countries." Many of the sessions reported on specific projects. The University of Washington chapter discussed a water supply and cook stove project in Bolivia, while other chapters reported on projects dealing with water quality in Thailand and water supply in Ethiopia. Other projects were based in Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Togo, and Peru. But the conference also addressed practical matters like the role of women engineering leaders working in traditional cultures, determining the project the community really needs, and designing for sustainability. The last two items are key to all EWB projects. The technology has to be what the community really needs, not what the NGO wants to implement, and the solution has to be something that locals can maintain after the team leaves—although a five-year follow-up commitment is part of every EWB project. Talkin' About Your Generation Gates alluded to the Bolivia project in his keynote: "The chapter from the UW has a long-standing relationship with villagers in Bolivia. You work together—on the ground in Bolivia—to understand their day-to-day problems. And then you work together on solving them. "From my office at the Gates Foundation, I don't have the foggiest idea how to help Bolivian villagers. But when you visit Bolivia, spend time in people's homes, and feel the sting in your eyes from the stove fumes, you figure out pretty quickly that those fumes—and those stoves—are dangerous. "And then you know that the appropriate technology is the safe, clean burning stoves you have helped them install in their homes." Toward the end of his speech, Gates recalled the civil rights movement of the '60s and how his family would talk about civil rights around the dinner table and how the Gates children studied and debated the issues in school. He drew an analogy between the work of EWB and that movement—not so much in terms of the actions that people take or in the issues involved, but rather in the similar sense that things should not be allowed to go on this way, that something is fundamentally wrong and that some action is required of one. And he closed like this: "I am an old man, a member of what they're now calling the Greatest Generation. But I have only just realized—toward the end of my life—how big my world is. That my world is not just my neighborhood, or my city, or my country. That the world I live in is actually as big as the world on a map. "You are young, and you already understand how big your world is! "In just eight years, your organization has grown exponentially. Your great generation has the energy to lead this movement, and euphoria is not too big a word to describe how it makes me feel. So all I can say to you now is thank you, and go to work." At bottom, EWB's mission is simple, yet inspiring: Find real problems that people face, and solve them. That's what engineers do, right? If you'd like to find out more about Engineers Without Borders, here's some contact information: Engineers Without Borders USA, www.ewb-usa.org. The International body, www.ewb-international.org. Australia, www.ewb.org.au; Canada. www.ewb.ca; Quebec, www.isfq.qc.ca.