Engineers Without Borders works with local communities to create positive change

The Globe and Mail, October 30, 2006

According to Brenna Donoghue, Director of Communications for Engineers Without Borders Canada, “Poverty is not about weakness. For the 800 million people who go hungry each day and the one billion who lack access to clean water, poverty is an absence of opportunity.”

Since its inception six years ago, Engineers Without Borders (EWB) has strived to create opportunities for people in developing communities. They’ve sent over 200 volunteers to work overseas, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. These dedicated volunteers help communities gain access to technologies that will improve their lives. They build knowledge and capacity among local entrepreneurs and organizations, to spread innovative solutions to poverty’s challenges.

Since access to basic engineering technologies can reduce poverty, hunger and disease, EWB volunteers labour to find solutions in three sectors -- agriculture and food production; agro-processing and rural energy; and water and sanitation. They create sustainable change by appropriately incorporating technology into each community’s social, cultural, economic and political context.

For example, one EWB volunteer, Mike Quinn, spent over a year in southern Zambia, a location where frequent droughts led to a reliance on food aid. He observed that the local community was accustomed to growing maize, a form of corn, which requires rich soil and lots of rain. Many years as much as 60 per cent of the maize crop would be lost to drought.

“Quinn worked to encourage local farmers to grow sorghum, a grain that needs less water and less fertile soil. However, he realized the local culture would be slow to accept sorghum as a food, since they were accustomed to eating maize several times a day. So he tried to help the farmers sell the sorghum as a cash crop, especially to nearby Botswana, where it is already accepted as a preferred food,” Ms. Donoghue explained.

Quinn and now the volunteer who later continued the project helped create a market for the sorghum and get people on board. “We wanted to make this a good experience for the farmers. Since birds eating the grain are one of the challenges with sorghum, we even held a bird scaring contest – a fun event to publicize the best ways to grow sorghum as a cash crop,” said Donoghue. The ongoing project is a success on two levels. Not only is it providing farmers with cash they can use to purchase their foods of choice and other necessities, the sorghum itself is an emergency source of food for the Zambians.

Other projects have included teaching local people about sanitation, such as locating latrines far from water sources. “We find that just creating a source of clean drinking water only solves about 30% of the health problems. We need to teach basics, like washing hands after using the washroom before drawing water from the well, to ensure the well water remains uncontaminated.”

Volunteers like Mr. Quinn, a veteran of two stints with EWB, are “dedicated, passionate people” who make an enormous contribution. They sign up for a minimum of 12 months and many stay for 36 months at a time. According to Donoghue, “Doing long-term projects means our volunteers can integrate and build trust, which is very important to development work.” EWB volunteers make a lasting impact by ensuring local communities have the needed skills and knowledge to develop appropriate solutions to their own unique problems.

In Canada, EWB members and volunteers raise awareness about the roles of Canadians and our government in poverty alleviation worldwide. They believe Canadians are passionate about development and want Canada to become a model global citizen for how the world responds to the challenge of global poverty.