Week 2

Panel:

It was nice to see the variety of engineering work being done at ESW.  My experience with Engineers Without Borders (EWB) was mostly centered around ME work, building pipes, pumps, whatnot.  With ESW, you had some CEE concepts being applied with the Struvite project and EE applied with the electricity project.  I thought it was funny that the researchers had to go around asking strangers for electricity to charge batteries.  I wonder how those conversations went.

 

Safe School:

Very cool project and beautiful presentation.  I definitely got the sense the community was invested in this project and made it their own.  I’ve heard in the past that development work in general is 80% social work  (surveying the community, talking with people, holding education and training programs) and 20% technical (actually doing technical design construction work).   It seems like this project adheres to that model, but perhaps with a bit higher fraction of hands-on technical work.

 

Project:

This last week, Nabil and I looked over a business plan concocted by the original DrinkWell members for a fortification project in Kenya.  We liked the format and we will be able to salvage about 20-25% of the text for our own business model.