CU Engineers in Rwanda

The international helping organization Engineers Without Borders has a special connection with the University of Colorado. EWB was founded at CU’s College of Engineering by Bernard Amadei, a civil engineering professor, and now supports some 350 programs in 45 countries. There are 180 local student chapters, mostly at colleges of engineering, and about 120 professional chapters.

Christine Barstow, president of the CU-Boulder student chapter, spoke to Boulder Rotary Club this month about the group’s work in Rwanda. Barstow, a Ponderosa High School graduate from Parker, is an example of the new engineer who is skilled at both high tech and simple applications.

In Rwanda, the young engineers are helping the communities of Muramba and Mugonero. Working with local people, they have built a solar energy system. They have also helped improve families’ cooking  by helping local artisans learn to fabricate an efficient cookstove that uses less fuel and produces a cleaner heat, reducing smoke generated in the enclosed space of a home.

These projects are badly needed in Rwanda, which is still affected by the aftermath of the 1984 genocide. The country of about 10 million people is landlocked and has the highest population density in Africa. The usual diseases found in depressed economies – such as HIV/AIDS, lower respiratory disease, and diarrheal diseases of various types – are prevalent. Deforestation for fuel has degraded the land and the high population density has led to overgrazing, soil exhaustion and erosion.

After seven years working in Rwanda, Engineers Without Borders can now point to the successful solar power project, which provides dependable lighting for a hospital and schools, and an EWB-designed, locally built water purification device that uses sand filtration and ultraviolet final sterilization.

Barstow and her colleagues will be returning to Rwanda this summer and continuing their work by helping to establish a micro-enterprise to build the high-efficiency cook stoves and incorporate the technology into the local culture. Projects typically seek to educate the affected population so improvements will continue after the teams have left.

Funding comes from a variety of sources, with Rotary prominent among them. Rotary clubs in Rwanda have served as local agents for Rotary Foundation grants generated by clubs in the United States, including Boulder Rotary.

"There has also been a great personal impact on us engineering students,” Barstow said. “We have learned from hands-on projects using engineering principles, we have traveled to countries seldom visited by Americans, and we have become ‘global citizens.’”

Amadei, who still teaches at CU, holds degrees from the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley, and was recently elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He became interested in ways engineers could provide simple engineering advances in third world countries with basic needs for pure water, sanitation, cooking and energy conservation. He asked some of his students to join him in field work, leading to the creation of EWB as a way to prepare the next generation of socially conscious engineers. He directs the Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities at CU.

For more information on Rotary, see  www.boulderrotary.org or www.rotary.org.

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February 24, 2010