Engineers Without Borders reaches out to African country

In the African nation of Burkina Faso, giving birth is a health risk. One out of every 10 children dies in infancy, and seven out of every 100 mothers die while giving birth.

Engineers Without Borders, a student-led international development group, is trying to create a brighter future for women giving birth in Dissin, a rural town in Burkina Faso, where babies are often delivered by the light of a flashlight, and a lack of running water and electricity jeopardizes the health of mother and child.

The group is going to build solar-paneled roofs to provide lighting at four health clinics surrounding the town, and a water pumping and filtration system that will help provide better care at the clinics.

“These clinics are off the beaten path. There’s no electricity or water, and they see about 30 to 40 patients a day,” Kevin Diehn, one of the project managers for the work in Burkina Faso, said. “The main issue is night deliveries, where they have to use a flashlight, and it’s not good for the babies or the mothers.”

Members of the group traveled to Dissin this summer to evaluate projects they had already done and determine how they could expand upon them.

“In August, we tested the water and found bacteria that are markers for worse bacteria and diseases, so we’re trying to develop a filtration method using iodine of chlorine to increase the water quality,” Diehn said.

The project, led by Diehn and co-project manager Kelly Canfield, previously had three successful phases in Dissin, including implementing a lighting system at a literary center so people who worked during the day could study at night, and installing water pumps for farming purposes that filled a large tank and helped conserve water from the rainy to the dry season, Diehn said.

Diehn said the group’s projects cost about $30,000 to $40,000, with part of the money going toward plane tickets and the rest toward building materials, which they bought locally to spur Burkina Faso’s economy. But this year, the group received a $12,000 grant for the project from Boeing, Diehn said.

A team will be returning to Dissin to implement the solar panels in January and a second time in June for the water pumping and filtration system, said Mike Fetters, the public relations officer for the group, furthering a years-long relationship.

“The relationships with communities have been growing beyond anything we could have thought,” Fetters said.

Diehn said the goal of the group is to make as big an impact as they can, and if something fails, then they try to impart a stewardship on the people to take charge of the projects and even duplicate them.

“The goal is to stay with a community for five years, scout projects, identify as many needs as we can and build a trust with them,” Diehn said. 

The group also has two other projects in Ethiopia and Peru, Fetters said, including a community-center building project in Ethiopia and a retrofitting project in Peru that involved building upon a water chlorination system they built last summer in a small Andean village.

cetrone at umdbk dot com