Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) works in 4 countries in Africa, and has 34 student and professional chapters in major universities and cities across Canada.
In Canada: EWB members are working hard to promote social responsibility among Canadians, pushing for people to make decisions in their everyday lives with thought given to how it affects the poorest in the world. This includes things like buying Fair Trade goods, and investing ethically. Students in EWB chapters across Canada are working with their faculty to ramp up Global Engineering in the curriculum. This means working in and outside core engineering courses, and running seminars that aim to produce critically-thinking engineers who have the tools they need to solve the big challenges of the world today. Lastly, EWB is advocating for the Canadian government to responsibly and effectively spend Canadian foreign aid money. EWB’s goal is to become a prominent CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) “watchdog” who works with the government to make sure Canadian overseas programs are helping the extreme poor the best way they can.
Overseas: In Zambia, Malawi, Burkina Faso, and Ghana, EWB works with local organizations and/or government. The idea is to support African solutions to African problems. EWB’s philosophy is to get to the root cause of the problem and, keeping the culture and needs of the communities in mind, to work to provide opportunity to people living in extreme poverty to improve their own livelihoods. This means connecting farmers to markets, producers, and processors; working with the Malawian government to develop water-point monitoring systems that grant access to clean water; pushing for evidence-based rural infrastructure planning in Ghana to improve access to public services. EWB has a social leadership and systems-thinking approach to fighting poverty, with a focus on developing the capacity of local organizations.
For more information about EWB’s work, visit www.ewb.ca. For more details on African programs, visit www.ewb.ca/africa.
