Dr. Bernard Amadei, founding president of Engineers without Borders-USA (http://www.ewb-usa.org/) exhorted his audience (a full-hourse of students and professors at the Fiedler Hall Auditorium) to consider “service to humanity” as part of their professional work lives.

He joked that his openness to “random processes” led to his founding Engineers without Borders in Fall 2000. By chance, he picked a landscaping company for a project at his home that involved workers from Belize. These people told him about their home country and their Mayan culture, and they asked for his help to improve their town. He agreed to, and that was the start of his growing awareness of some of the world’s needs. The engineering challenge: move water 125 feet from a river to the village, so that children didn’t have the onerous work of moving water and so they could attend school. His and his students’ solution: Use the energy from a local waterfall to provide the energy to pump the water.

While some men make massive changes when they have midlife crises, he said that he kept his life mostly intact except for starting this non-profit organization.

Small Scale Changes

He said that while many in his civil engineering profession brag of the big projects that they work on, he says that the size emphasis is part of egotism. There’s plenty of small-scale engineering projects that may make critical differences in people’s lives. This is “engineering with a face,” he said.

The difference between textbook problems and these applied engineering projects is that failure is part of the equation. “If all the problems in the world were technical, then all the world’s problems would be solved by now. Poverty has nothing to do with technology,” he said, and suggested that political challenges like “corruption, corruption, corruption” were major problems.

His organization maintains at least five-year commitments to a region because it takes time to build the relationships necessary to development. It also takes time for accurate assessment and design. Sustainable development is not dependent on engineering but rather the building of a “healthy community” through medical inputs, educational inputs, capital investment, as well as engineering inputs. He showed an image of a “report” that wasn’t a 200-page assessment that is not uncommon in development circles but was just an image of how water may be contaminated by human and animal fecal matter and so shouldn’t be drunk without treatment or filtration. Stories may be told to communicate ideas in virtually all cultures, he said, and these should be used educationally and developmentally.

He cited the The World Bank’s 2007 Economic Report (http://www.worldbank.org/) with its focus on the need for building educational capacity to move people out of poverty. With population growth in the next dozen years estimated to add some 2 billion more people, with 97% in the developing world, the need for water, energy, education, and sanitation will exacerbate human tensions. There cannot be peace when there are so few resources to go around, he suggested. That, he said, is a “design problem.”

Engineering for Refugee Camps

Amadei described some projects he’s working on. One is the design of a quick-response engineering team to deal with problems that stem from war, conflict and natural disasters. How can shantytowns be quickly built up and engineered?

Charity, he said, is only a first line of defense. Capacity building is needed for thelong term. And human capacity must necessarily create economic potential based on local strengths and cultures…for homegrown solutions, not colonial Western-created ones. “Findout what people do and help them do it better. Empower the local people,” he suggested. He said that he’s met people with a lot of degrees who lack intelligence but also people without any degrees who’ve been very smart.

In French (his native tongue), “engineer” is derived from a root of “ingenious,” and engineers need to use that ingenuity to solve the world’s challenges, he suggested. These ideas have been around a long time, he said, and cited E.F. Schumacher’s book “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered” (1973).

Primary School Education, and…

Those in development often focus on higher education, he said, when a focus on primary school education (such as through fifth grade) and vocational education are needed. This learning is applicable for daily life. "How come vocational training is not 'sexy'?" he asked rhetorically.

He has traveled to many developing countries as part of his work, including Afghanistan. He gave an example of a project where street kids are empowered to use garbage to create burnable briquets for warmth, baking, and cooking, given the destruction of the trees from earlier wars.

From $1 to $2 a Day...through Systems Thinking

He said that empowering those in the developing world is a critical impetus not only to control for future potential wars and conflagrations but also as an ethical duty. Despair leads to violence, he suggested. His goal is to raise people’s livelihoods from the $1 a day many live on to $2 a day. The risks of engineering without compassion are high, he said. Engineering with heart is critical.

In response to an audience question, he said that gender equity is an important principle of the group...and most teams are half-male and half-female.

Amadei spoke as part of the Eyestone Distinguished Lecture Series Nov. 10. Amadei is a professor of civil engineering at the Unviersity of Colorado-Bounder. Amadei also founded Engineering for Development Communities (http://www.edc-cu.org/) with a tagline of “Sustainable Solutions for a Human Face.” They apply “Education, Research & Development, and Service” in the service of human betterment.