Abstract
The engineering profession should embrace a new mission statement—to contribute to the building of a more sustainable, stable, and equitable world. Recently, engineering students and professionals in the United States have shown strong interest in directly addressing the needs of developing communities worldwide. That interest has taken the form of short-and medium-term international trips through Engineers Without Borders—USA and similar organizations. There are also several instances where this kind of outreach work has been integrated into engineering education at various US institutions such as the University of Colorado at Boulder. This paper addresses the challenges and opportunities associated with balancing two goals in engineering for humanitarian development projects: (i) effective sustainable community development, and (ii) meaningful education of engineers. Guiding principles necessary to meet those two goals are proposed.
Highlights
At the start of the 21st century, humanity is facing the formidable challenge of securing basic quality of life for all people on our planet
As clearly emphasized in the proceedings of the 1990 meeting of the National Academy of Engineering on Engineering as a Social Enterprise, engineering is ―an adaptive socio-technical subsystem functioning within the adaptive socio-technical system of society.‖ Engineering functions inseparably from the society of which it is part of, and engineers need to be trained [9]
International development has traditionally been conducted by expert professionals in large, wellfunded organizations (United Nations, World Bank, USAID) or volunteers working for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
Summary
At the start of the 21st century, humanity is facing the formidable challenge of securing basic quality of life for all people on our planet. In addition to extra-curricular service organizations like EWB-USA, several domestic universities have worked, often independently, to integrate service learning, civic engagement, and outreach into their curricula [5,6,7,8] This trend reflects a growing consensus among some engineering faculty, practicing engineers, and university administrators that the current system of engineering education is not adequate to create global citizen engineers who have the skills to address complex geopolitical and economic problems. This paper highlights the authors’ experience with various engineering projects implemented by EWB and MC-EDC students at CU-Boulder over the past seven years It originated after reading a paper entitled ―A model for sustainable short-term international medical trips‖ by Suchdev et al [11]. This paper proposes similar guiding principles that should be applied to short- and medium-term engineering for humanitarian development projects in order to avoid pitfalls associated with expensive but inconsequential trips
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