 First world engineers helping to solve third world problems

In the last assignment we talked about what caused the problems and here we’ll talk

about solutions to the problems.

The role of engineers in contributing to global poverty reduction and the SDGs

requires an upgrade. The 2020 UNESCO report Engineering the Sustainable

Development Goals frames this imperative: “The engineering profession must

embrace a new mission statement – to contribute to the building of a more

sustainable, stable and equitable world… Together, we envision a world where all

people have access to the services and resources necessary to live healthy, fulfilling

lives and live-in dignity and at peace, while working to preserve our global

environment upon which we all depend. To do so, a new action-based blueprint for

global engineering education, life-long education and practice is needed for the

engineering profession to contribute to meeting the SDGs by 2030” (Amadei and

Thomas, 2020).

Luckily, several complementary academic and professional fields, including Global

Health and Development Economics, have a longstanding track record and

philosophy from which we can learn.

Global Health as a field of study, research, and practice, is well established. The

Consortium of Universities for Global Health describes it as a field that, “emphasizes

transnational health issues, determinants, and solutions; involves many disciplines

within and beyond the health sciences and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration;

and is a synthesis of population-based prevention with individual-level clinical care.”

in health for all people worldwide.”

Similarly, Development Economics, as embodied by the World Bank, is a field

dedicated to studying and leveraging economic tools including taxes, trade,

transfers, loans, and investment to improve economic growth in low-income

countries.

The Global Health and Development Economics communities are grounded in

method and tool development, evidence generation, and translation of findings into

national and global policies. Many implemented policies, impact evaluations, or

research studies conducted by economics or public health professionals are designed

to address immediate needs and generate evidence to inform policies and funding

decisions. Publications, methods, tools, and technologies are evaluated, tested, and

refined, and consensus is built through meta-analysis and dissemination.

However, Global Health and Development Economics are imperfect models.

Implementation and evaluation procedures are often designed and conducted with

foreign funding and foreign experts, which can have the effect of reinforcing

autocracies and creating a “tyranny of experts” (Peet, 2014). However, the

professionalization of these fields has resulted in a high degree of influence both on

policy and the public.

This book presents the case that Global Engineering should be concerned with the

unequal and unjust distribution of access to basic services, such as water, sanitation,

energy, food, transportation, and shelter, and as engineers we should place an

equitable access to reliable services. Global Engineering envisions a world where

everyone has safe water, sanitation, energy, food, shelter, and infrastructure, and

can live in health, dignity, and prosperity.

Global Engineering can be the professional and academic complement to Global

Health and Development Economics. It focuses on broadly improving the tools and

practice of poverty reduction, and includes health, economics, policy, and

governance as relevant dimensions, requiring professional engineers to be

conversant in these fields.

It is challenging to strike a balance between forgiving optimism and paralyzing

pessimism when examining the spectrum and arc of global development. As

engineers, we want to be able to design and implement durable solutions. However,

we need to broaden our perspective to include solutions to underlying structural

problems.

The field of Global Engineering can contribute to addressing these structural issues,

by developing and validating methods, tools, and standards that are broadly

leveraged to increase poverty reduction. Technology development and

demonstration, data collection, and impact evaluation can all contribute to evidence-

based influence on policies and practice. Remote-sensing technologies are informing

conversations about the impacts of global warming; data collection and analysis

technologies support impact evaluations by generating robust findings on the

effectiveness of interventions; systems engineering is expanding the engineer’s lens

service delivery; and engineering education is embracing history, public health, and

policy.

Shelters and Settlements- Engineering and design contributions to improved shelter

and settlement design in global development have shifted in recent years from

providing emergency and temporary assistance towards a more comprehensive,

settlement-based approach. This shift corresponds to the increasing overlap in

humanitarian assistance and longer-term development.

Typically, humanitarian and disaster relief efforts are deployed separately from

conventional development efforts. Humanitarian relief usually occurs in response to

natural disasters, conflicts, and displacements. Engineering in this context has

focused on rapid response in camps for refugees and other displaced people, with

the general intent to provide services on a provisional basis.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Foreign

Disaster Assistance has a dedicated “humanitarian shelter and settlements” program

that works to ensure safe and appropriate housing for disaster-affected

communities, including considerations of culturally appropriate design, privacy,

security, water and sanitation services, and future disaster risk reduction measures.

This emerging application of global engineering “bridges the humanitarian–

development nexus, from pre-disaster resiliency to emergency and temporary

shelter, to the long-term development of sustainable housing and settlements,”

(Javernick-Will, 2020).
Remote sensing- Space-based Earth observation instruments, while often funded,

designed, and operated to serve the particular interests of wealthy countries, can

provide benefits to developing countries at minimal additional cost. The insights

gained from the analysis of remotely sensed data can result in practical actions as

well as informing policy and public response.

Instrumentation- Many development programs, from household-scale

interventions to large-scale infrastructure, rely on third-party funders and

lengthy processes for proposal development, implementation, and some

measure of monitoring and evaluation. Despite increasing emphasis on the

monitoring and evaluation phase, however, the reality of finite and time-bound

funding often means that donors do not receive information about medium-

and long-term impacts within developing countries which could inform their

funding decisions.

This information and knowledge asymmetry can in part be addressed through

improvements in the technologies used to collect ongoing data on the

performance of interventions and the services delivered (Thomas, 2016).

Technological innovations in the design, deployment, and validation of

instrumentation, and furthermore the analysis of data generated, can be used

to inform programs, policies, and donors.

improving the functionality of rural water supplies, reducing the downtime

between repair activities, and ultimately improving water services, reducing

water insecurity, and reducing the impacts of drought. The intervention

includes installing satellite and cellular-connected sensors monitoring the

runtime of rural electric pumps, and linking these data through algorithms to

online dashboards. The data are intended to be used by regional maintenance

providers, utilities, national government entities, and international donors to

both enable and support increased prioritization of repair services (Thomas et

al., 2019).

Chantal Irbagiza, a Rwandese engineer, helped pioneer these approaches

when she became frustrated by the regular breakdowns of rural handpumps

in Rwanda.

While instrumentation represents a technical intervention, the insights

generated are intended to inform policymakers, local and national budgeting,

and donor decisions in an effort to recognize and address the major gap

between the funding available for infrastructure installation and the funding

available for operation and maintenance, both at the scale of the programs

themselves, and by informing discussions at a global level.

This effort requires the participation of engineers from a broad range of

disciplines, including civil, environmental, mechanical, and electrical

foreign aid, and community strengthening. A series of evaluations, including

an independent impact evaluation, are currently being conducted to study

these efforts. The instrumentation used has the unusual status of being both

part of the intervention’s theory of change, while also serving as the primary

data collection tool used to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention

activities.

The Mortenson Centre at the University of Colorado Boulder has evolved a

model of scale-appropriate technology design and implementation, with an

increasing emphasis on the development and validation of more broadly

applicable methods, technologies, and evidence generation. As reflected in

the name change from “Engineering for Developing Communities” to “Global

Engineering”, the Centre seeks to positively impact vulnerable people and their

environment by improving development tools and practice.

Thomas, E. A. et al. (2019) ‘Quantifying increased groundwater demand from

prolonged drought in the East African Rift Valley’, Science of the Total Environment.

doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.02.206.

Thomas, E. a. (2016) Broken Pumps and Promises: Incentivizing Impact in

Environmental Health. Springer.

Peet, R. (2014) ‘The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten

Rights of the Poor’, Journal of Economic Geography. doi: 10.1093/jeg/lbu022.

Amadei, B. (2019) ‘Engineering for peace and diplomacy’, Sustainability

(Switzerland). doi: 10.3390/su11205646.

Thomas, E. (2019) ‘Toward a New Field of Global Engineering’, Sustainability.

Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 11(14), p. 3789. doi:

10.3390/su11143789.
https://www.colorado.edu/center/mortenson/the_global_engineers

Bourn, D. and Neal, I. (2008) ‘The Global Engineer Incorporating global skills within

UK higher education’, Dfid.

World Health Organization (2011) Evaluating household water treatment options:

Heath-based targets and microbiological performance specifications, WHO Press.

doi: 10.1016/j.ijrobp.2007.10.057