Conference issues the call: engineers as force for change

A team of University of Washington engineering students designed a simple stove to help villagers in Bolivia breathe cleaner air.

Two young engineers — one Israeli and one Palestinian — are working together to help solve water and sanitation problems in the West Bank.

Their work can be a force for change as powerful as politics or business, said Bernard Amadei, co-founder of Engineers Without Borders-International.

Addressing a full UW auditorium Sunday at the group's annual conference, he called on engineers to be "social entrepreneurs, community builders and peacemakers," working on behalf of people living in poor conditions in the developing world.

"I do believe as engineers we can work together to make the world a better place," he said. "It's time we move to become social activists," he said.

Amadei, who started the nonprofit organization seven years ago, has inspired engineers to apply their work toward problems of global inequality, mirroring similar social movements by doctors, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and others. Engineers Without Borders-USA, of which Amadei is founding president, now has 300 chapters across the country.

More than 600 people attended the conference on the theme of sustainable development and global health, demonstrating projects such as clean cook stoves in Bolivia, a solar-powered water system in Ghana, aquaculture in Mexico and telemedicine in Peru.

Those concerns reflect a cultural shift in the field over the past five years, said David Cook, a geologist who mentors local students as president of the Puget Sound chapter of Engineers Without Borders.

"Students demand change," he said. "They will not accept the status quo. They demand to be out there to help solve problems of the world."

Collaborating with local nonprofits and Seattle's Ethiopian community, the Puget Sound engineers are working on a system of earthen dams to contain surface water in drought-prone southern Ethiopia.

Training engineers to help solve problems of global poverty will attract more young people to the field, Cook said.

"Our generation is interested in the situation of poverty all over the world," said Donee Alexander, a doctoral student and projects director for the UW chapter of Engineers Without Borders.

But the curriculum of engineering schools doesn't prepare them for that, she said.

The UW team gained hands-on experience working for two years to design and install wood-fired stoves in Bolivia. They had started out working with a local engineer on an irrigation project, but after meetings with villagers they found another common problem: Poor indoor cooking stoves were ruining the lungs of local women.

Alexander and her classmates designed a stove that would stop the smoke from accumulating in the huts, testing a prototype in a Seattle backyard.

In Bolivia, they went house to house with a local stove builder and a village leader, showing women how to use the stove, adjusting the design from feedback, she said.

Engineering solutions are needed to serve the billions of people around the world who lack sufficient food, clean water, sanitation and electricity, said Amadei, professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

He called on his colleagues to "spend less time on the golf course" and "stop writing the stupid technical papers that people don't read."

Instead, more people should "work on transformation of the world from the bottom up."

Those efforts might even serve as an antidote to one problem plaguing privileged societies, he said: depression.

Kristi Heim: 206-464-2718 or kheim@seattletimes.com