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Lafayette’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) has received a grant from Kathryn Wasserman Davis 100 Projects for Peace for starting a new economic initiative as part of its ongoing work with rural villages in Honduras.
Administered through the Davis United World College Scholars Program, Projects for Peace is giving $10,000 awards to 100 student-designed grassroots projects from organizations at any of the 76 American colleges and universities who are members of the program’s network.
EWB’s main project for the last several years has been providing about 1,000 people in Lagunitas and La Fortuna, two rural villages in the Yoro district of central Honduras, with clean drinking water. The team is designing and constructing clean water distribution systems and irrigation in the villages, which have never had access to safe drinking water. Professors and student teams have taken numerous trips to the work site since the project began.
The Projects for Peace grant will be used to start a new, related project which will help the economy of Lagunitas and La Fortuna. Eight EWB members have developed a prototype of a coffee grinder powered by a bicycle. The device will allow village members to grind the coffee beans into a more profitable final product as opposed to their current practice of simply selling the beans.
“This project demonstrates the way real-world experiences allow engineering students to understand that technological problems are not isolated but are contained within the broader socioeconomic context of communities,” says team adviser Sharon Jones, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and chair of A.B. engineering. “Our main objective in Honduras is to provide sustainable clean water and sanitation alternatives for rural communities. However, one aspect of sustainability is the community’s ability to maintain these infrastructure systems over time and that takes financial resources. As such, the students quickly saw that another impact they can have is to work with the community to find ways to increase their income.”
Along with Jones, David Brandes, associate professor and acting head of civil and environmental engineering; Michael Jordan, assistant professor of foreign languages and literature; Bonnie Winfield, director of the Landis Community Outreach Center; and Michael Benitez, director of intercultural development, are the team’s advisers.
Project organizer Kavinda Udugama ’09 (Kandy, Sri Lanka), an electrical and computer engineering major, and Marquis Scholar and chapter leader Margaret Garcia ’07 (Stamford, Conn.), who is pursuing a B.S. civil engineering and A.B. with a major in international studies, researched the idea after discovering similar projects with bicycle corn grinders in Guatemala.
“It is important to help this community because they are very under-privileged and they do not have access to some of the basic amenities that we take for granted,” says Udugama. “It is EWB’s mission to improve the living standards in these communities and I feel that this particular project does just that.”
The students will use the grant to develop a marketing plan for the grinder and to test the technology during the next onsite trip to the communities this summer.
“Since we’re providing these rural communities with new technology, they also have to learn to use it to maximize their economic gain,” says Udugama. “Therefore these communities need a proper business plan that lets them use the grinder and then they can take their product to the market place and sell it with a higher profit margin.”
Other students involved in the coffee grinder project are Trustee Scholar Ian McBride ’09 (Rye Brook, N.Y.), an electrical and computer engineering major; Aung Lin ’10 (Geneva, Switzerland); Taha Jiwaji ’08 (Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania), who is pursuing a B.S. electrical and computer engineering and A.B. with a major in economics and business; Marco Tjioe ’09 (North Sumatera, Indonesia), who is pursuing a B.S. mechanical engineering and an A.B. with a major in chemistry; and Marquis Scholars and mechanical engineering majors Katie Pitz ’08 (Millers, Md.) and Sara Riddle ’08 (Gaylordsville, Conn.).
“It’s very exciting to know that a project that students came up with was given the financial backing to be implemented,” says Udugama. “This project can change the economics of the village and raise the income of the farmers if it works correctly.”
The Projects for Peace grant is not the first honor the group has received. Last year, EWB received national media exposure for being one of six college and university teams from across the nation to be awarded a $75,000 grant through the Environmental Protection Agency’s P3: People, Prosperity and the Planet Student Design Competition for Sustainability.
Also last year, civil engineering major Debra Perrone ’08 (Fair Lawn, N.J.) and Garciapresented the Honduras project at the fifth annual American Society for Engineering Education Global Colloquium held in Brazil.
EWB has also been chosen as a showcase team to attend the 2007 National Idea to Product Competition for Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) and Social Entrepreneurship at Princeton University March 24.
For further reading about Lafayette’s Engineers Without Borders, go to the following links: