The Alcoa Foundation announced this month that EWB-SA was selected alongside 12 other Engineers Without Borders International affiliates to receive grant funding as part of the Creation of a Global Engineer Program. The program is designed to create and replicate the best practices of “learning through service programs” that develop skills in leadership, project management, communication, systems thinking and community and personal engagement.
EWB-SA will utilise the funding to develop their Project Roots community of practice. Project Roots takes EWB-SA members back to the fundamentals of planning and executing successful development projects. The grant funding will subsidise the development of an online library of project resources and forum through which members can communicate and collaborate on projects nationally. This will serve as a virtual extension to the current Mentorship programme, Project Life Cycle workshops and Human Centred Design Courses within the ‘Transferring Engineering Knowledge’ focus area.
Running a successful development project requires introspection and collaboration says Matt Docherty, EWB-SA’s Head of Projects. It’s a journey in which you go from exploring what motivates you, to what motivates your team, to what motivates your community and sponsors. For EWB-SA our greatest achievement lies in enabling student engineers achieve this realisation and to carry it with them into the workplace. The objective of Project Roots is to facilitate this process by ensuring that projects run smoothly and that learnings are remembered and shared.
“For EWB-SA receiving the grant from the Alcoa Foundation presents a tremendous opportunity to start documenting the collective experience of the EWB-SA community. Over the past 5 years EWB-SA members have planned and implemented over 30 engineering-related community development projects across South Africa. To deepen our understanding of the work we do we need to improve our knowledge sharing and training practices. Project Roots will be the first open online platform in South Africa that shares best approaches, learnings and failures of engineering practices in a local development context.” – Wiebke Toussaint, Chief Initiator of EWB-SA.
If you are interested to work with EWB-SA on developing Project Roots as the online go-to place for Global Engineering resources in Africa contactwiebke@ewbsa.org and share how you would like to contribute.
