Community engagement assessment of global humanitarian-based projects

Abstract

International educational opportunities for engineering students include, but are not limited to, internships, study abroad programs, and humanitarian programs such as Engineers Without Borders. Since 2007, a two-semester Global Engineering Outreach course at Brigham University has enabled engineering and technology students from multiple disciplines to design and implement humanitarian-based engineering projects. Energy, water, sanitation, and health projects have been implemented in Tonga, Ghana, and Peru. Currently, the projects focus on the needs of communities in Peru. Typically, nearly half of the students in the two-semester course speak and write Spanish fluently and have lived abroad in a Spanish-speaking country. This allows students to regularly engage with their Peruvian counterparts during the two semesters via phone and email exchanges on a near-weekly basis. An important aspect of the regular contact is the need to establish relationships and to obtain feedback and input from the community regarding the project. This work presents an overview of product development in relationship to the effectiveness of community engagement between the student development team and the Peruvian counterparts. In addition, strategies to foster community engagement will be discussed. Such strategies include workshops, resource development and investigation, design constraints and reviews, in-country communication, and an implementation trip.