DEVELOPMENT REPORT - Engineering
Low-Tech Solutions for Places in Need
By Jill Moss / Broadcast date: Monday, January 07, 2008
Source: http://www.unsv.com/voanews/specialenglish/
This is the VOA Special English Development Report.
Sometimes it takes an engineer to help a village. In poor communities, that help may
come from volunteers with a group called Engineers Without Borders.
A civil engineering professor in the United States, Bernard Amadei, launched the group
in two thousand. He did it with the help of his students and friends at the University of
Colorado at Boulder.
Professor Amadei took a group of students to Belize to help build a water project.
Since then, Engineers Without Borders has grown into an international nonprofit
organization. Its budget last year was four million dollars. The group currently has
about three hundred projects in forty-five countries.
Engineers Without Borders works on low-technology projects in mostly developing
countries. In the Himalayan mountains of Nepal, for example, the group set up a sun-
powered computer to communicate with a school in Kathmandu.
In Guatemala, volunteers have built ten bridges for communities cut off from nearby
populations by seasonal rains. The group has built windmills in Kenya to improve crop
production. And in Rwanda, Engineers Without Borders is rebuilding areas destroyed
during the nineteen ninety-four genocide.
Cathy Leslie is the executive director of Engineers Without Borders. She tells us that
many of the group's eight thousand members are students who volunteer as part of
their college or university studies. Working professionals and retired engineers also
have formed local chapters throughout the United States.
In the next five years, organizers hope more than ten percent of the members will be
non-engineers. Cathy Leslie says community development involves not only
engineering but many professions. She says it is equally important to help villages
develop business plans and ways to finance and supervise projects.
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