HOW SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS CAN CONTRIBUTE TO CAPACITY BUILDING IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Gabrielle McGill, an Industrial Chemist by training, tells Rita Henderson, UNSW, about her 12 month trip to Cambodia working in the WASH sector with Engineers Without Borders, Australia

Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Australia is a not-for-profit organisation, which is trying to link engineering skills with people in need. Their mission statement is to ‘connect, educate and empower people through humanitarian engineering’. Essentially, they want to avail engineering technology to those who need it to help them create a life free from poverty. EWB has a large volunteer base in Australia and have two rounds a year where they send people on 12 month placements. These placements are aimed at capacity building of the local staff and there is typically a partnership developed with a local not-for-profit organisation. It is this organisation that identifies their own capacity and development needs and skills. In the case of Gabrielle’s trip to Cambodia, the local organisation, Live & Learn Environmental Education Cambodia, was the not-for-profit that EWB Australia was working in partnership with. Rita interviewed Gabrielle to find out more about her experience…

So, what exactly did you do while you were there?Live & Learn Environmental Education was working on sanitation solutions for communities who live on Lake Tonle Sap in Cambodia (approx. 1.6 million people). I was working with a team there on two solutions that were culturally, financially and technologically appropriate to the local community to meet their sanitation and hygiene needs. The two solutions that we were looking at were a urine diversion dessication toilet (UDDT) that separates out urine and faeces and also anaerobic biodigestion. Now is probably a good time to mention that the communities currently practice open defecation into the lake. The lake is very much the community’s livelihood in terms of fishing and also people occasionally have to drink that water. If they did, they would filter the water to treat it,

but there are obviously health ramifications related to this.

Photo 1. Gabrielle and colleague transporting a biodigester to the community

What inspired you to go and work with EWB Australia in Cambodia?So, ever since university, I’ve always been intrigued by the idea that knowledge has the capacity to change the lives of people. I was fairly interested in the environment, but my strength was chemistry and so that was what I chose to study. I guess this was always at the back of my mind and so I always thought that I’d become involved in an organisation like EWB. I went overseas on a trip to Peru where I was involved with a local church organisation a couple of years prior to this and I found it really frustrating to be on that trip and be able to help but not in what I would consider a meaningful way. And so, when I came back I got involved in EWB. I’d heard about their placements and was very interested by them and realised that this would be a good way to use my skill set. When I graduated from uni, I went to work for a consulting company, GHD, in water and wastewater treatment so I think that this was in the back of my mind when I made this choice.

Which of your existing skills did you end up using when you went on your placement?Well…I can tell you all the skills that I didn’t have when I went there

The requirements were 3 years experience in water and wastewater. I had been working as a water and wastewater process engineer at GHD for around 3 years and so I had those skills. But, the skills that probably gave me the edge for the job were actually from the time that I spent in GHD’s community consultation and stakeholder engagement team where I learnt how to convey the meaning of a project to the community that were going to be affected by it. I had been involved in other volunteer work which I think also interested EWB Australia. So it’s not necessarily about being technically the most impressive but about how you have worked with others to develop a solution that works.

Photo 2. The Lake Tonle Sap floating community

So, what skills did you pick up while you were there?I learnt to speak some Khmer, the native Cambodian language. If I had spoken some of that prior to going, that would have been very useful!

It was really interesting working across cultures. I was fortunate that I had females of a similar age that I was working with; some others that I knew worked in very male dominated teams, which I guess can still be quite typical of engineering.

Mostly, it was about communicating something that might be technically difficult to the local community. An appropriate solution might mean trade-offs, e.g. it might be more expensive for example. Really it’s not so different to a cost-benefit analysis that you would do as an engineer in Australia, it’s just on really a different scale. It’s interesting as people think it’s so vastly different but I can see similarities.

I would have really appreciated a stronger microbiological background. We were developing these technologies and we had to prove the technology that we were using. In Phnom Penh, we had built several scale biodigesters and we were testing them. We were working with the local university and had samples to be analysed. There were a couple of institutions that could do analyses of total coliforms and E. coli, but, not having a good microbiological background, I found it difficult to assess the data. Also, there are other parasites that we wanted to test for but the labs weren’t able to do that. If I’d had a microbiological background, I might have been able to do more to address that issue.

What achievement are you most proud of?We definitely made differences to individuals’ lives. One interesting experience involved cross-collaboration with a University of Sydney student who was working on electrification of a rural Cambodian village. On this project, we went out to the Kandal Province and we installed a biodigester at a woman’s house. She was so happy. While I couldn’t understand everything she said due to my lack of Khmer language skills, she explained that she could now cook for her family as well as the two families next door due to the gas delivered from the biodigester. It had made such huge impact to her life as she would normally cook with wood which could also lead to respiratory problems in the long term. Another woman was most happy about how clean her pots were after cooking with biodigester gas, as the flame burned a lot cleaning than typical wood fires.

Photo 3. Gabrielle and Royal University of Agriculture, Phnom Penh students at their biodigester testing site

So, were communities most impressed by the biodigesters rather than the UDDTs?Yes, I would say so. I guess this is understandable. On a Facebook page that I was maintaining (Gab and the Floating Toilets – another achievement (www.facebook.com/gabincambodia), one of my friends commented on a paper he had presented about antiseptics and antibacterials. Both were developed at the same time but one was taken up much faster than the other. One was about prevention of disease while one was about treatment of an infection. Because it provided immediate relief, people were more interested. Similarly, the biodigester produces gas and so has immediate benefit and so people are more interested in it. Also, while we ultimately want the biodigesters to treat human waste, we worked mainly with pig waste and so think they were easier for people to adopt. The intention is that the toilet would flush into the anaerobic digester although we didn’t get to that level of design. We wanted to first prove to the community that the biodigester would work.

Are there plans to do further the project in the future?Hopefully! The project was a finalist for the Global Humanitarian Awards and recently the project about scaling up the biodigester and incorporating the treatment of human waste was awarded the Google Impact Rise Challenge which was about creating a better world faster. So the work should continue now. Even after I left my colleagues at Live & Learn Environmental Education continued the work.

Has your placement changed you view of your work in Australia?Yes and no. I still like my job here. Not everyone is always happy to return to more corporate life. I have the benefit of working on infrastructure that is built to maintain public health in Australia and I think I have a better appreciation of that element of my job now than I used to.

With respect to my on-going work with EWB and on the GHD Community and Stakeholder Engagement team, I have a new found respect for the need to communicate the technological need or benefit to a community and to see it from their point of view.

I’m more passionate now to help scientists and engineers understand the importance of not designing technology for its own sake, it has to be about the humans who are going to use it. An example is that you don’t build a bridge to connect one side of the river to the other; you build bridge to enable to people to cross. It’s a subtle shift but a meaningful one.

And what do you miss?Public holidays (Cambodia has 26 of them!). Fresh coconuts. $1 lunches.

I have spent most of my life behind a computer. In Cambodia we were physically building things. While I don’t miss playing with cow and pig waste as I feel a little cleaner going home from work at the end of the day, I do miss being involved in the whole process, from the inception to the implementation.

I also miss my colleagues. We used to joke when we came home from work: Did you save the world today? And it was nice as we could say: Yes, a little bit. I miss talking about toilets all the time too!

What advice could you give to other young scientists and engineers who would like to follow a similar path?Learn skills here first! And then, once you’ve learnt them, don’t assume that that’s the best solution. It’s important to go abroad with some skills, straight out of university is not the best time to go. It’s also important to consider the type of organisation that you might want to work with and the sustainability of the projects in the long term. I really enjoyed working with EWB as they didn’t just go in and build something, their focus was on the partnership and hopefully this means that their projects will have longevity.

What can organisations like the Royal Society of Chemistry do to assist in building capacity in developing countries?One of the difficulties is that what works in a country like Australia or the UK does not necessarily work in a country like Cambodia. Obviously, if you are not placed in a different environment, you can’t always see why it won’t work. One area where such organisations could help is in increasing capacity of individuals. For example, as I mentioned, we had problems with laboratories not being skilled enough to do the testing that we required. Organisations could send people to assist in training or simply provide funding for organisations like EWB.

Anything you would like to add?I loved it!