Content provided in partnership with

TO THE RESCUE

ASEE Prism, Mar 2006 by Mulrine, Anna

Engineers use their skills to help solve the problems of the developing world, everything from pedal-powered washing machines to medical devices that help AIDS patients.

IT WAS SEVERAL YEARS AGO that Robert Malkin began to feel frustrated. The professor of the practice of biomedical engineering, who also directs the Engineering World Health program at Duke University, had lived in Thailand and knew that hospitals there were "really desperate for technology." He also knew that his students had the know-how to create devices that would be helpful to the hospitals and their patients. The problem, he says, was that "there was no organization teaming up this need with the talent." He and the chair of the biomedical engineering department at Temple University lamented the problem at a local bar.

Most Popular Articles in Reference: The importance of understanding organizational culture; Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students; What factors attract foreign direct investment?; Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...; How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques; More »

Then, Malkin says, he ran into Amy Smith from Massachusetts Institute of Technology at a conference. Smith, who has been called a "MacGyver for the Third World" in places like Wired magazine, mentioned that her students were doing great work creating engineering solutions that would be helpful to the world's poor-but that distribution of those solutions was a challenge. That gave Malkin an idea.

This year, for the first time, engineering students at Duke are teaming up with master's in business administration advisers to not only develop technology solutions for real problems in the developing world but also come up with business plans to get their creations more widely distributed-inventions that create and modify high-tech devices in ways that make them more useful to the world's poor. "There are thousands of problems that are relatively tackle-able," Malkin says. "Not every problem in the developing world is, 'Let's find a vaccine for AIDS.'"

Across the country, engineering students are increasingly interested in the problems of the developing world, professors say. The $100 laptop program through the Media Lab at MIT has done a great deal to call attention to the ways in which engineers can use their skills to help the world's poor. And today, engineering students at MIT compete in a program called IDEAS as part of the university's International Development Initiative. Among their inventions: a battery-powered projector that allows community education centers in Mali to store entire libraries on a single tape and then project the "books" onto walls-"thus allowing people to learn without having to buy multiple books or pay for lighting," says Alison Hynd, MIT's IDEAS Competition and Fellowship coordinator. The groups have also come up with pedal-powered washing machines. "They were getting a lot of requests from women spending eight hours a week washing families' clothes. It's an enormous labor and time-suck," Hynd says. They also created a system called DonkeyNet, which makes use of donkeys that travel from village to village in places like China, India and Latin America to serve as mobile access points for Internet connectivity-and in so doing, provided wireless access for rural markets at a fraction of the cost of current alternatives.

Hynd explains that the IDEAS program was created five years ago to give engineering students the chance to expand their conception of community service and to test their skills. "People tend to think of community service as soup kitchens. And these engineering students have so many fabulous skills," but, she adds, "they weren't always thinking of applying them to the developing world." The competition has grown rapidly in popularity, and, with it, engineering students are seeking out more opportunities to help out. Applications for the ideas competition are "twice" what they were last year, Hynd says. "It's suddenly taken off," she adds. "There's lots of interest, and it's becoming very popular."

For her part, Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technology officer for the $100 Laptop Project, says that she has increasingly been struck by the ability of engineers to help better the lives of the poor. She was inspired by the work of Engineers for a Sustainable World and Amy Smith, who devised a way to make clean-burning fuel using high-compacted sugarcane. Smith, who received her undergraduate and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT, was also awarded a McArthur Fellowship. Smith's work, Jepsen says, made her wonder "how I could use my skills to do something with real impact for the world"-and not, she says, design "another HDTV," as she had been doing between 1998 and 2004. Smith's work using compacted sugarcane ("which is usually not useful," Jepsen explains) addressed a leading cause of death for children under 5 worldwide: respiratory diseases from inhaling the usually dirty burning fumes in the kitchen.

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

REGINA CLEWLOW says the role of engineers in bettering lives throughout developing countries is vital. As she was about to join the Peace Corps, Clewlow founded Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) to give engineers, particularly engineering students, a chance to apply their skills to helping the world's poor. "I had my interviews done and my application in the mail and was waiting to hear about where I'd be placed." She chose instead to found ESW and in doing so, she says, "I've probably been more effective in shaping change by helping to start ESW." The group "has created a lot more opportunities for engineers to learn about poverty and about Sustainable development-and to take direct action to effect change." Since founding ESW chapters at 30 university campuses across the country, Clewlow says, "I'll come across professors who went to a lot of these schools, and they'll say, 'Man, I wish they had these things when I was a student.'" Clewlow adds that "even though I wasn't a student all that long ago, there weren't projects like ours." Indeed, as organizations like MIT's Media Lab and ESW proliferate, "we are enabling and engaging engineering students and professors to address the world's most pressing problems, increasing access to resources in developing communities around the world."

TO THE RESCUE

ASEE Prism, Mar 2006 by Mulrine, Anna

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Autos

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference