Engineering for Change Podcast: Recent Episodes
Engineering for Change
This podcast is a series of interviews and conversations with experts, academia, and practitioners in the field of development engineering on the successes and failures of the field today.
On this episode of the Engineering for Change Podcast, we will be switching gears and taking a look at the sanitation sector in development. Speaking with two renowned experts in the field, Jonathan Truslove and Gaetano Romano, Bryan Sherrill and Marilynn Holguin-Clover explore the challenges in sanitation globally, why these challenges exist, and the best ways for practitioners to solve these problems in the field.
Gaetano Romano is the Senior Manager for Engineers without Borders Australia. He left Italy with a master's degree in engineering, strong experience in the education sector, and a genuine curiosity for the rest of the world – he has still not gone back. His international career began as a volunteer in a vocational training center in Cambodia. He went on to specialize in integrated water resources management and water, sanitation, and hygiene, realizing that contributing to improved access to water and sanitation was what he wanted to do. He spent 20 years working side by side with communities, mostly in Cambodia and Myanmar but also in Chad, Uganda and Bangladesh, the Pacific. Jonathan Truslove holds a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Strathclyde and is passionate about people-centred engineering for global development. His research addressed the legacy of water supply coverage during the millennium development goals to date, and the interconnected sustainability challenges communities face across the life-cycle of water supply in rural Malawi. He joined Engineering for Change (E4C) in May 2020 as a Water Research Fellow, researching sanitation in challenging environments in Cambodia, in collaboration with Engineers without Borders Australia. Jonathan is currently a Research Associate at the University of Strathclyde, supporting water engineer teaching, research into the environmental and social benefits of blue-green-infrastructure as part of the Glasgow Avenues Programme. Link to Jonathan's Research Collaboration mentioned in the episode: https://www.engineeringforchange.org/research/sanitation-challenging-environments-cambodia-[…]e-sanitation-solutions-hard-rock-areas-rural-cambodia/
Link to 2021 UNC Water and Health Conference mentioned by Jonathan in the episode is here.
Link to more information on the Engineering for Change Fellowship program here. Friendly reminder that applications are due on February 28, 2021.
In this episode, we pick up where we left off talking about rural water supply and access by discussing the experience and work of Eva Manzano, a member and director of the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST) in the Latin American Region. Aside from hearing of her own experience doing field work, we get to hear a bit of the optimism Eva sees with NGOs in the space as well as the repercussions of COVID-19.
On today’s episode, the pilot, we will begin to take a broad look at the current situation of the rural water sector and the critical obstacles still to overcome. From there, I will introduce a fellow fellow (see what I did there), Marilynn Holguin Clover, who has worked extensively with indigenous communities on water access in her home country of Colombia. Together, the two of us will have a conversation with Gabrielle String, a postdoctoral scholar for the Lantagne Group in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University about the integration and involvement of indigenous peoples in this conversation of water rights and access along with a few practical tips that development practitioners can use in their own professional careers to engage local communities in a meaningful way.