The Organization
Engineers Without Borders is a movement of professional engineers, students, overseas volunteer staff, and supporters across Canada. Together, we are almost 50,000 strong. We believe that the next generation of rural Africans should have the same opportunities to improve their lives, that we have right here at home.
To help make this a reality, our members and volunteers apply all the creativity, technical skills and problem-solving approach for which engineers are known.
In Africa, our volunteers work in partnership with local organizations and communities – combining our knowledge and experience to find unique solutions and devise innovative ways to apply them. Our work is focused on enabling rural Africans the opportunity to access clean water, generate an income from humble farms, and access critical infrastructure and services.
At home, EWB is leveraging our network of 34 professional and student chapters to create lasting change across Canada. We engage Canadians, our government, companies, and universities on a widespread scale, to build their connections to Africa and make choices that better promote and contribute to human development.
We do five main things:
-Develop leaders in Canada and Africa who have the capacity to build a more just world
-Engage Canadians to connect and contribute to Africa
-Advocate for improved Canadian policies toward Africa
-Help the engineering profession serve a global society
-Support rural African capacity
Please find more information at the following links:
EWB Frequently Asked Questions
Our Areas of Work
Junior Fellowship (JF) Program
The Junior Fellowship program is the bridge between our African and Canadian programs. Every year, chapters send one or two members to work on one of our projects overseas for four months. These placements offer an introduction to development and rigorous leadership training to members. They are as much about building great leaders and providing members with their first exposure to development work as they are about having impact overseas. While we will have some impact in the communities that we work in, our greatest impact will be in our home community and at our university upon return. Through talking about what we learned and experienced with people here in Canada, we will play an integral role in sharing an accurate depiction of development in Africa and raising awareness about the urgent need for development overseas.
If you're interested in learning about the experience of other JFs, please visit some of the blogs on the main page.
My Project- Water and Sanitation- Community Led Total Sanitation
EWB works in Malawi, Zambia, Burkina Faso and Ghana on Agriculture, Water and Sanitation and Governance projects. We link up with like minded organizations to build their capacity to do their work better. I've been placed in Malawi on a Water and Sanitation project, specifically working on Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS).
In rural Africa, some communities have and use latrines, other may have and not use latrines, and others do not have latrines. Where latrines are not used, communities openly defecate in the natural environment. Water can come in contact with feces spreading diseases like cholera and sickness like diarrhea.
CLTS is an innovative methodology for mobilising communities to completely eliminate open defecation (OD). Communities are facilitated to conduct their own appraisal and analysis of open defecation (OD) and take their own action to become ODF (open defecation free).
At the heart of CLTS lies the recognition that merely providing toilets does not guarantee their use, nor result in improved sanitation and hygiene. Earlier approaches to sanitation prescribed high initial standards and offered subsidies as an incentive. But this often led to uneven adoption, problems with long-term sustainability and only partial use. It also created a culture of dependence on subsidies. Open defecation and the cycle of fecal–oral contamination continued to spread disease.
In contrast, CLTS focuses on the behavioural change needed to ensure real and sustainable improvements – investing in community mobilisation instead of hardware, and shifting the focus from toilet construction for individual households to the creation of “open defecation-free” villages. By raising awareness that as long as even a minority continues to defecate in the open everyone is at risk of disease, CLTS triggers the community’s desire for change, propels them into action and encourages innovation, mutual support and appropriate local solutions, thus leading to greater ownership and sustainability.
CLTS was pioneered by Kamal Kar (a development consultant from India) together with VERC (Village Education Resource Centre), a partner of WaterAid Bangladesh, in 2000 in Mosmoil, a village in the Rajshahi district of Bangladesh, whilst evaluating a traditionally subsidised sanitation programme. Kar, who had years of experience in participatory approaches in a range of development projects, succeeded in persuading the local NGO to stop top-down toilet construction through subsidy. He advocated change in institutional attitude and the need to draw on intense local mobilisation and facilitation to enable villagers to analyse their sanitation and waste situation and bring about collective decision-making to stop open defecation.
CLTS spread fast within Bangladesh where informal institutions and NGOs are key. Both Bangladeshi and international NGOs adopted the approach. The Water and Sanitation Programme (WSP) of the World Bank played an important role in enabling spread to neighbouring India and then subsequently to Indonesia and parts of Africa. Plan International, WaterAid and UNICEF have become important disseminators and champions of CLTS. Today CLTS is in more than 20 countries in Asia , Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.
CLTS has a great potential for contributing towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals, both directly on water and sanitation (goal 7) and indirectly through the knock-on impacts of improved sanitation on combating major diseases, particularly diarrhoea (goal 6), improving maternal health (goal 5) and reducing child mortality (goal 4).
In addition to creating a culture of good sanitation, CLTS can also be an effective point for other livelihoods activities. It mobilises community members towards collective action and empowers them to take further action in the future. CLTS outcomes illustrate what communities can achieve by undertaking further initiatives for their own development.
"CLTS yabweretsa mgwirizano"- CLTS has brought togetherness
