Report of a special meeting held on 14 October 2009 in Committee Room 9, House of Commons.

Chairman: the Lord Broers

Panel of speakers:

Andrew Lamb, CEO Engineers Without Borders
Priti Parikh, senior consultant, Arup International 
Thalia Konaris, graduate engineer
Petter Matthews, Executive Director, Engineers Against Poverty    

This was a special event for the APPEG – our first ‘debate’, fully sold out and with a large waiting list. The audience numbering over 60 included members from both Houses, many young engineers and prospective engineers; and representatives from sponsors Bosch, Rolls Royce, and BAE Systems. The audience also included Professor Peter Guthrie, Professor of Engineering for sustainable development at Cambridge University and representatives from engineering institutes.

Lord Broers opening the event said that the subject matter of the debate was of supreme importance in view of the serious implications of climate change, not least the special impact of climate change on underdeveloped parts of the world and the resultant increase in poverty and disease. He had always felt that engineers had a crucial role to play in helping to alleviate these problems and he hoped that the debate would stimulate discussion on what engineers were doing and could do in the future to play their part.
 

He then introduced the panel of speakers and invited them to say something of their backgrounds and how and why they had become engineers and the work they were now engaged on.
 

Andrew Lamb:
 

Thank you Lord Broers for your invitation to speak here today. I have been asked to give an overview of how I got into engineering and some of my thoughts on engineering, international development and young people.
I think I’ve always been an engineer. I played with Lego. I lived under the flight path to Heathrow – running out into the garden to watch Concorde fly over every day. I was thrilled by it!
 

And I took what might be deemed as a fairly standard route towards engineering at university: I took part in several of the schemes from the Royal Academy of Engineering’s BEST programme, from the Smallpeice Trust and I did a Year in Industry with a microprocessor design firm. I was a member of my school’s technology club (the department has now closed down) with teachers who supported me in my hobbies.

Then I won a place at university. And I went. And I crashed. It was awful – and it nearly broke me. I even wanted to switch to architecture because at least they got to build models!

I then found an organisation just starting up called ‘Engineers Without Borders UK’ and I started to take an alternative route in my career. The idea of helping people, of hands-on engineering, of actually working on projects that do make a difference, of solving problems... the organisation seemed to me to embody the very purpose of the engineering profession.

I’ve since worked with RedR in London and Nairobi, with UNESCO and with EWB-UK.

EWB-UK is an odd organisation. It is run entirely by students and young people. It is, however, profound as a ‘movement’: 3,500 members in the UK and 30 universities and a Professional Network covering all disciplines.
It is a symbol of a very fundamental change: a new generation of engineers who have grown up hearing about famine in Ethiopia, Live Aid, the Rio de Janeiro Earth summit, the Rwandan Genocide, the Jubilee Debt campaign, the Millennium Development Goals, the Indian Ocean Tsunami and the Make Poverty History campaign. Our social networks span the globe. We’ve never known a world without the Internet, cheap flights and mobile communications. We’ve benefitted from badly needed changes to our education to include the global dimension in lessons at school. In our normal engineering undergraduate courses we have covered ethics, sustainability, economics, management, engineers in society, and professional studies.

Many countries have Engineers Without Borders organisations – the movement itself is global.
Engineers Without Borders is, I think, a reaction to the way that our profession (that we are so proud of) is not addressing some of the greatest problems mankind has ever faced. We set up EWB here in the UK because the profession was missing the point.

Now, our members are not simply the bleeding hearts of the engineering world. They are hard-core engineers doing good engineering. They prioritise engineering rigour. Our members are highly skilled and many have won prestigious ‘Young Engineer of the Year’ awards or been selected for the Engineering Leadership Award. Our members have a pretty good gender split – all six of our programmes are run by women, and I would estimate that about 45% of our membership are women. We have domestic students and international students involved, working together.
When they graduate, they often face a false choice: should I work for a company and become an engineer or should I work for a charity and help lift people out of poverty? I get phone calls from engineers in HUGE companies coming to our TINY organisation asking us to help them save the world. It’s crazy. It shouldn’t be this way.

Charities cannot work on the scale of companies – the scale that is required to meet the challenges that we face. The profession, the private sector and government need to figure out a way to make sure that there are ways for companies to not only build ski slopes in Dubai but also to meet basic needs of the billions of people without access to sanitation. The role of engineering in policy seems to be of economic importance only – that it is a key path to innovation and growth. I believe in the economic imperative of engineering, but I also believe that every international development effort – good governance, transparency, anti-corruption, health treatments, primary education – is crippled because basic needs are not being met by engineers.

I believe that we are on the cusp of a new decade of international development. In the 1960s and 1970s, the emphasis was on big infrastructure projects. Their mistakes led to a focus on small, intermediate technologies in the 1970s and 1980s. When the perception became that Africa was littered with wells and pumps that didn’t work, the focus moved –rightly – to the social dimensions of technology in the 1980s and 1990s, and then on rights-based approaches in the 1990s until now. Many of the managers and policy makes in the development world were educated at a time when engineering was out of fashion in development. What we need now is a new development decade where this new generation of engineers – who understand global issues and social dimensions – can take part. I think we’re getting there because the engineering profession is waking up to international development. What we need now is for the international development community to wake up to engineering once again.

A statistic (that I’m certain is apocryphal but it makes the point) that has really stuck with me is that 90% of the world’s engineers work for 10% of the world’s population. That cannot be allowed to continue, or we will all suffer.
I’d like to wrap up by introducing some of the young engineers in this room:
• Richard Cunliffe – a graduate from Imperial College who led a team working on a rainwater harvesting project in Tanzania this summer.
• Peter Cooper – who has just started at Bristol University after spending the summer with us working on education materials on international development for engineering academics to use.
• Maryam Lamere – who worked with academics and students at City University here in London to establish a new branch, only our second in London at the time.
• Dave Howey – who, alongside his PhD in microhydro, plays a key role in an organisation called Developing Technologies which also works with students at universities to conduct research.
• Ellie Cosgrave – who just graduated and is now studying an EngD in sustainable cities. Ellie is EWB-UK’s Education Co-ordinator in her spare time and has had a number of successes getting material into courses.
• Ellie Griffiths – who has just graduated from Nottingham and recently won a place on an expedition to Antarctica to look at the effects of climate change, an experience that she is using to conduct outreach work in schools.
• Anna Lea – a graduate from Oxford who set up training courses covering all sorts of issues relating to international development at university and who is now working for a firm supporting her with a field visit to Benin next week as part of her masters course on water and sanitation at Cranfield University.
I’m looking forward to hearing the discussion on these ideas with them and with you all.

Priti Parikh:
 

Ladies and Gentlemen - It is a privilege being here today. My parents, who are British Citizens went to India 27 years ago to do interesting things in life related to engineering. My father works in the slums and villages of India and has changed the lives of half a million people in Indore through water and sanitation provisions using his engineering skills via a DFID funded project. He was therefore my inspiration and I become an engineer. After graduation in Engineering and Post graduation in Planning there, I worked in my fathers private sector consultancy designing a five star hotel in Rajasthan. This hotel was lavish with marble and bathroom fittings imported from Italy and I spent the bulk of time designing 100 retaining walls. I quickly realized that this was not quite what I wanted to do in life and hence moved on working on projects providing water and san in slums and villages where I could work with communities. That has left a profound impact on me and have learn a lot actually on the ground what really works and what does not work. The results emerging were so powerful and contrary to conventional wisdom that 5 years ago I decided to do my Doctorate at Cambridge to validate the findings.

I am currently based in the International Development team of Arup and have managed to combine my passion for international development in the mainstream business (commercial) of a well reputable and established engineering consultancy. I have benefited from the wide range of projects that Arup has to offer me and likewise Arup has benefited and gained from my expertise or rather I hope so!

Through my practical experience of 10 years and the 700 house interviews in slums carried out during my doctorate I would like to raise a few key points:

1.Firstly, there is nothing cheaper, faster and better than water and sanitation infrastructure in slums and villages to alleviate poverty. My research shows that a one time expenditure of £100 per family on water and sanitation infrastructure had directly increased literacy rates of poor children (particularly girls) from 30% to 60%, reduced infant mortality and had almost doubled the incomes of the poor (particularly women) in 5 years, something India has not been able to achieve in the last 30 years

2. I asked 700 families to prioritise their needs and they all came back with a single response. ‘We need water and sanitation’. I heard a touching story of a mother in a slum who was talking about how governance etc was good but could she have water so that daughter would not spend 3 hours in the queue collecting water and she could attend school.

3. 5 years of the provision of water and sanitation infrastructure, the communities had rebuilt their huts to houses at an average investment of £1000 per family coming entirely from their own savings and family support. This was 10 time the initial investment on water and sanitation. The community cited the initial water and sanitation investment as their main catalyst for their own subsequent investment in housing.

The current model of intervention in governance with no application or project level intervention as practised by many donors has flaws. International development is not about aid, creating dependencies or changing governance structure. It is about engineers providing services and solutions in developed and developing countries which are realistic and appropriate to the local context with tangible and measurable outcomes. It is about addressing ‘basic needs’ in life. I think that if young engineers work in developing countries with practitioners and local communities to provide technical and practical solutions they can make a substantial contribution to international development. If policy makers can create an environment which harness the energy and skills of engineers and allow them to apply them effectively on projects in developing countries then world will be a better place. At present, in the development agencies, engineers are seen as just technocrats who come in at the end of the development process as mere functionaries. We have forgotten the importance of civil engineering and the way the Roman empire grew on the back of aqua ducts and water

Currently 2-3 billion people out of the 6.6 billion people globally do not have access to basic services and housing and with increasing rates of urbanisation the problem will get worse. So we have a busy time ahead of us and especially for the younger members of the audience.
Thanks

Thalia Konaris

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen,
I would like to start by thanking Lord Broers, Jennifer Bryant Pearson and Richard Smerdon for giving us all the opportunity to be here today.

In this brief introduction, I would like to mention some of my experiences as a graduate engineer pursuing a career in development and then mention 3 key lessons I’ve learnt, which I hope will contribute to our discussion today.
When I left school I pursued an engineering career, inspired by a mechanical engineer father who has passionately designed automatic machines for as long as I can remember.

During my undergraduate studies however, I struggled to remain motivated to complete a theoretical degree, which offered great knowledge of how to use the engineering ‘tool’ but offered little insight into why or in what context I should use it. And this is something that especially the female engineers on the course struggled with.

I was therefore very fortunate to become involved with Engineers Without Borders UK. Because for the next 4 years, in parallel to my studies, I was offered constant drive and training to become an engineer who could help tackle issues of climate change, poverty, inequality and resource depletion.

In my final year I was mentored to become a volunteer CEO of the organisation. Such opportunities for responsibility and creativity are unfortunately rare for students. This was a highly rewarding experience involving steep learning curves but also the networks and opportunities I needed to pursue a career in international development.
I was thus able to follow a post graduate degree in Engineering for Sustainable Development at Cambridge University, which supported my research in Nepal on successful NGO partnerships in the field of water and sanitation. Thanks to the EWB-UK Placements scheme I am currently on an internship with the INGO, Practical Action getting a feel of working in the NGO sector. My experiences so far have enabled me to secure a scholarship by the Japanese government to conduct research in Japan next October on NGO accreditation for quality and accountability – an area which I feel is of great importance to the effectiveness of the sector.
What you might take from all this is that there is no easy, formal career path for engineers who wish to work in the humanitarian sector!

I would like to finish my introduction with 3 lessons I have learnt in the last 5 years, the first of which stems from my research in Nepal:
 

1. Nepal today is facing great challenges including disease, high child mortality rates, pollution and an energy and water crisis due to ill maintained and insufficient centralised infrastructure. The UK on the other hand is struggling with old infrastructure, such as our Victorian sewage system, which cannot cope with the rapid climatic changes of our times. As a result, the decentralised technologies being promoted in both countries to reduce vulnerability, are the same. (e.g. rainwater harvesters, constructed wetlands, biogas digesters, grey water recycling etc.)
International development is not so much about ‘somebody else’s problems’ as much as it is about collaboration and establishing a win-win situation, where we learn from each other to solve problems of a global dimension.
 

This also brings me to my second point:
 

2. The global crises we are facing today are not technological crises. But technology is a vital part of their solutions.
Here i give the example of migration. By 2030 it is estimated that 81% of urban population will belong to developing countries. This is largely because rural communities migrate to cities in search of infrastructure and security from an increasing rate of natural disasters. Focussing therefore, on provision of basic services such as health, education, water and sanitation to rural communities reduces their vulnerability and the further instability caused through large scale migrations.
 

Finally this brings me to my 3rd point.
 

3. That engineering is a vital tool, but that engineers are not tools.
I feel that traditional engineers have shied away from financial, political or social agendas to focus on technical optimisation and reliability. As a result, technology has fallen victim to all those agendas. There is a danger that as engineers we focus on DOING THE WRONG THINGS, THE RIGHT WAY. We could build a brilliant dam. It could displace hundreds of thousands of people with no plan for adequate compensation, but as a dam it would work perfectly!
 

In conclusion: the international development challenges we are facing today, are complex. Let us at least start with the easy parts. We face global challenges, and we have passionate young engineers who wish to be trained to provide holistic solutions. So let us give them that opportunity!
Furthermore, global issues, require global collaborations. Extending across disciplines, across sectors and across nations. So let us start with this room today.

Petter Matthews :
 

Engineers Against Poverty in an independent NGO based here in London. It was established 10 years ago by some of the UK’s leading professional engineering institutions. We work with government, industry and civil society to fight poverty and promote sustainable development. Our efforts are directed towards three areas: (1) the extractive industries, (2) public sector infrastructure and (3) engineering education. We seek to influence corporate and public policy in ways that produce practical improvements in the lives of poor people through creating jobs, promoting enterprise development and improving education and training.

I was asked to say a few words about how I came to be doing what I’m doing that requires that I begin by revealing my guilty secret; I’m not an engineer. My career started 30 years ago with my leaving school and completing a bricklaying apprenticeship. I moved into construction management during the 1980’s property boom and used that experience as a route into international development in 1989 as VSO volunteer. I worked overseas for 10 years and returned to the UK to go to university as a mature student where I studied development studies, politics, social policy and planning. I started working for EAP about 8 years ago.

It was soon after starting work in the construction industry that I discovered what motivates me in life. Firstly, a powerful sense of injustice at the suffering and inequality that I see in the world. Secondly and allied to that is a belief that it is possible to intervene and improve things. There is nothing natural, normal or inevitable about global poverty. It is the result of definite choices and probably for the first time in human history we now have the means at our disposal to eradicate poverty. It was recognition of this that drove me to use my experience in the construction industry to get involved in international development.

This career path is a bit unconventional and I’m not recommending it as a model to be followed. If I was starting out today my choices would be different because the opportunities associated with careers in engineering have changed so much. Engineering contractors and consultants are now widely recognised as key contributors to the solutions needed to tackle global issues such as poverty and climate change. Those companies know that they have to be socially responsible if they want to attract and retain the best staff. They also understand that attracting investors and maintaining shareholder value requires that they maintain high ethical standards in all that they do.

Of course this isn’t to say that there aren’t still challenges within the engineering industry and further battles to be won, but a powerful trend is underway that I believe is irreversible. The engineering industry needs to attract highly motivated young people into the industry to continue and accelerate this trend. And I have no hesitation in saying to young people who are motivated by a passion for peace and social justice, who want a career that enables them to fight poverty and promote sustainable development, that you should be giving serious consideration to a career in engineering.

Themes from the debate

An early topic was the quality of engineering courses themselves, not least in the sense of whether the courses gave enough time/ learning to topics of development and solutions for poverty. Opinion was divided. Ellie Cosgrave, a graduate engineer from Bristol University, spoke of how she and other undergraduates had persuaded their tutors to alter the course so as to make it more relevant. In response to suggestions that this might run the risk of dumbing down on the essential building blocks of a course e.g. maths, she made it clear that she was passionate about getting the maths and science understood to the highest level , but that this should not preclude relevance to the world in which they were going to practice. A young teacher spoke eloquently of the engineering course she had designed at her school for students from the age of 11 upwards. A plea for not dumbing down engineering courses was made by a consultant engineer working overseas who saw candidates for jobs from all over the world but who always made sure that successful candidates were tested by UK engineering institutes because they were the best. Rolls Royce spoke of the training they gave to engineers, including working overseas with local communities under difficult conditions.

Another theme which came through from the panel was that in underdeveloped communities the priority was not governance but sanitation and water: initiatives along these lines could transform a whole society.

There was agreement from the panel about the importance of the role of private business in delivering solutions in many cases more effectively than NGO’s and a plea for private business to get even more involved. The President of Bosch, Klaus Peter Fouquet spoke of his company’s work in India in producing a ‘small’ car, low on consumption, using local expertise and he emphasised that solutions were innovative and low tech –this in response to a point made earlier that maybe engineers should not always go for low tech solutions. He also emphasised the need to train ‘technicians’ as distinct from technologists /engineers. Many more technicians were needed. Jon Bowden from Siemens plm Cambridge asked whether the know how from developing solutions to problems was being made universally accessible.

Lord Howie then expressed his concerns that the need for large scale civil engineering skills and ‘traditional’ engineering was being ignored in the debate. Too great an emphasis could be placed on the ‘idealistic’ side of engineering. This observation stimulated much discussion with Lord Broers urging that the idealism of engineers should not be suppressed.

Professor Guthrie commented on a number of the issues raised in the debate; congratulating the teacher who had designed an engineering course for her school; welcoming the initiative by Ellie Cosgrave at Bristol University, and commenting that when students took this kind of initiative then tutors were bound to take notice: However, there were real practical difficulties in trying to implement changes in curricula which had to be born in mind. Professor Guthrie in disagreeing with the concerns expressed by Lord Howie paid tribute to the views expressed on the panel which saw a broad view of the role of the engineer: He hoped that he would live to see the day when the first engineer became a member of Parliament.

Lord Broers then invited the panel to sum up the most important issues to carry away from the debate.

Andrew Lamb: Final thought:

Priti Parikh: Final thought: 1. Engineering inputs can change human lives and hence engineers have a key role to play in the field of international development. Currently engineers do not occupy key positions in aid/donor organisations. However if this changes then they can influence funding streams so that instead of investments in improving governance the investments can be used gainfully to provide solutions to meet basic needs of low income communities in Asia and Africa.
2. Engineers can provide technical and practical solutions to many pressing problems effectively if they understand the local context and form partnerships with local organisations.


Thalia Konaris: Final thought: Ladies and gentlemen I would like to conclude by touching briefly on some of the topics and concerns that have been touched on today:

On the role of the government

Understandably, the British government prioritises its own national interests and security and yet through bodies such as DFID, makes significant investment in overseas development. As I have already mentioned, the global nature of climate change is such that it is bringing national agendas worldwide and especially between developed and developing nations, closer together. Investment in international development for the British government is investment in reduction of vulnerability in rural or overpopulated urban communities, investment in protection from conflict, investment in climate change adaptation, food security, water crises, energy crises etc.

These are all unfortunately, increasingly likely scenarios also in the developed world and can therefore be easily taken out of their developing country context. Britain’s investment in overseas development should therefore be perceived as investment in its own future. Providing incentives for UK professionals to be involved in global collaborations and development interventions in poverty stricken communities equips them with the skills to deal with current crises overseas which are only the tip of the iceberg for crises to be experienced across the globe over the next few decades.

It is also worth noting that although the private sector has very good mechanisms for developing and marketing new technologies needed for such interventions, it generally does not invest in areas of high risk or in the absence of obvious economic returns. It is only with suitable government regulations therefore, that private sector activities can be aligned with national priorities for sustainable development. In fact, a research at MIT has shown that stringent government regulations stimulate innovation, as they provide opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators which the more established companies (the so-called dinosaurs) have too much inertia to take advantage of.

Finally, i suspect that in the future, as nations try to adapt to climate change by enforcing radical changes in lifestyle and infrastructure, it is the less economically developed nations that will have less inertia towards developing in this new direction in comparison to developed nations, not unlike the entrepreneurs already mentioned.

On accreditation:

Accreditation in its current form seems to me to be both a blessing and a curse. One of the greatest barriers faced by young engineers who wish to explore a potential career in the humanitarian sector, is the absence of formalised career progression and professional development to ensure they have the skills to work as professional development engineers. The absence of a formalised career path is due to the absence of accreditation mechanisms for engineers in the humanitarian sector to enable young professionals to aim towards chartership and excellence in their field.

I would venture to say that this is due to the nature of work of engineers in the development sector, which is much more broad, partly due to lack of human resources, (e.g. project management, logistics and procurement, fundraising, finance etc.), and often less technical than that of an engineer working in industry. Accreditation for the profession of a ‘development engineer’ therefore, would go a long way towards attracting young engineers to the sector and also increasing the quality of development interventions.

On the other hand, I feel that it is because of accreditation that engineering degrees succeed in imparting technical knowledge but fail in inspiring and building the confidence of young engineers to critically assess the relevance and suitability of those technologies. This is because as soon as modules around the application, relevance and ethics of engineering interventions are introduced into the curriculum, assessment is of an entirely different nature to that applied in engineering departments and is instead more similar to the forms of assessment found in social sciences. Something academics of engineering departments are broadly speaking, not trained and comfortable to apply. Instead, in an attempt to maintain a competitive advantage, universities encourage competition for quality in undergraduate courses thus putting more focus on grades than on the actual knowledge imparted. This is not as common a phenomenon in postgraduate studies where accreditation is more focussed on the content of the work conducted.

Engineering accreditation which defines quality in a more holistic way and enables more flexibility and creativity in the profession and engineering education would help alleviate both these issues.

O