So the EWB-UK pre-departure week has been and gone. It was a pretty intense time with tonnes of stuff to learn and interesting people to meet. One thing that struck me over the week is just how great it is to spend time with others who have similar interests - people from engineering backgrounds who are excited about international development, travel, culture and have a passion to help those less fortunate than ourselves.
The week started with getting to know more about the EWB team including Andrew Lamb, the chief executive and Jonny Gutteridge who's in charge of all the placements. I previously met Jonny during my interview in April at Arup's head office in London. Andrew led a seminar looking into our motivations for going away on placements - thinking about the huge mix of reasons we've chosen to put ourselves into unfamiliar situations in unfamiliar lands. He talked about how important it is to have a bunch of our own personal motivations which are robust- and that every one of these motivations will be challenged in some way whilst we're away. He highlighted the importance of reflecting on these motivations- knowing that some will be selfless, others selfish, some very specific and others which we don't quite understand ourselves.
We had a session looking at Logical Frameworks - (read more here - from good old wikipedia) which are used often in international development as a way of organising our thinking, setting objectives and relating activities. Its a relatively new concept for me, but comes across as an extremely useful tool when done correctly.
I won't bore you with detail of all the sessions we had over the week- but here's a few highlights...
- A session on putting international development into context- lots of interesting stuff about the history of development work, current global challenges and the challenge of empowering women and its effects.
- A couple of great sessions on health, safety and security complete with lots of tales of experiences across the developing world. We picked up plenty of tips on topics ranging from diarrhoea prevention (!) to dealing with road checkpoints and landmines.
- 'The big picture- Energy and development' was a great session by Drew Corbin of Practical Action consulting which talked about the strong links between energy access and the Millenium Development goals. He touched on the UN's 'sustainable energy for all' initiative, and the complicated concept of universal access to energy. He provided us with a bunch of really useful resources including the Total Energy wiki which can be used by anyone working in energy access for developing nations. He also gave some useful tips on getting a job in international development from an engineers perspective.
- Human Rights perspectives- with Miranda Sawston. A seminar discussing the question of "is access to technology a human right?" was very interesting.
- Newton Consulting's Ric Whalley came in to talk about being successful in our placement- and gave a great seminar looking at a really effective problem solving method called "split solving"
- Kas from the Institute of Development Studies gave us a really enthusiastic session on becoming a "Reflective" engineer- highlighting the importance of community consultation and introducing a third concept to development which sits between high-tech solutions and appropriate technologies, which she calls "pathways"
All in all, a huge amount to learn from and a lot to think about.
The week culminated with a fantastic African feast where we could eat together and have some time to relax and talk about what's to come for all of us.
