February 2008 Issue
GOODWORKS
Societal Change — the Engineering Way
Two mechanical engineering graduates from the University of Alberta are working
in two different economies and two different spheres of change. Yet the social
entrepreneurship that drives them is part of the same trend in engineering professionalism,
says a representative of Engineers Without Borders in this installment of our
series of EWB stories and opinion pieces
BY BINNU JEYAKUMAR, E.I.T.
Engineers Without Borders —
Calgary Professional Chapter
 |
THE POWER TO CHANGE |
Global awareness is cultivating a special breed of hybrid engineering professional. These social entrepreneurs combine their technical expertise with an arsenal of entrepreneurial and human development skills to create positive change in the world around them.
They are “not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.” That’s the description provided by Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka, a leading international social entrepreneurship organization.
What follows here are the stories of two University of Alberta mechanical engineering graduates — one in Canada, the other almost 15,000 kilometres away in Africa — and how they are putting their innovation and insight to work to create two types of change in two very different industries.
The Factory Man
We start in the remote village of Katimba in eastern Malawi. This village of
fewer than 900 people is the site of the only factory in the southeast African
country that extracts starch from cassava, a widely grown tuber in the region.
Each work day at 6:30 a.m., Danny Howard heads to the Masinda Starch Factory. If he arrives any later than 7, he owes the factory crew corn flour banana bread — the Malawian equivalent of obligatory doughnuts.
After graduating in 2006, Danny applied for an overseas volunteer position with Engineers Without Borders. He is now in Malawi on behalf of EWB and works in partnership with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, the Africa-based research-for-development organization that established the starch factory.
The factory purchases cassava from local smallholder farmers and is run by the farming cooperative. Since working with the agriculture institute, Danny has helped Masinda develop a successful market-based approach with added focus on production and profitability. This, in turn, is benefiting the lives of the farmers of Katimba.
On a typical day, he’ll help factory managers with planning and risk analysis. He’ll also help the main-tenance team ensure proper equipment operation — extremely important in an area removed from any source of electricity or spare parts. And his busy schedule will also mean communicating with the head office of the tropical agriculture institute in the capital city of Lilongwe as he negotiates contracts.
It makes for long days that sometimes carry on until 9 p.m.
At the start of his placement, Danny was tasked with devising improvements to factory equipment such as the cassava grater. He went on to identify ways to improve management and optimize processes. Danny worked with staff to reorganize the factory’s labourers into task-specific teams and streamlined extraction to increase overall plant efficiency.
He’s even helped the farmers themselves with their organization and planning skills.
Masinda, which produces 300 to 700 kilograms of starch per day, received even more of a boost from Danny when he helped negotiate a contract for 16 tonnes of starch for Packaging Industries Malawi. This deal created employment for additional villagers, increasing the number of plant employees to about 54 during peak production.
Under Danny’s leadership, the Masinda factory has started to generate positive cash flow and reduce poverty. It provides farmers with a reliable source of income and has enabled a level of security to plan for the future that they didn’t have before.
Danny hopes to see more factories like Masinda in the region over the next few years and anticipates that this pilot project will lead to “strong recognition across Malawi of the potential of cassava and its products for smallholder farmers and Malawian entrepreneurs taking on this industry.”
Towards Better Energy
That was Africa. This is Alberta.
Is it possible to affect a similar level of change in a thriving economy? Nathan Maycher, P.Eng., thinks so, and he’s out to prove it in Calgary.
Nathan is an expert at long-term forecasting and management of environmental risk for energy companies. His goal of reducing the social and environmental footprint of the Alberta energy industry means helping companies develop effective sustainable development programs.
In 2001 he co-founded the consulting firm Enwest and assisted energy companies in developing and managing projects that offset the greenhouse gas emissions produced by their sector. Nathan played a significant role in the Alberta Government’s formalization of GHG emission targets by participating in various consultation meetings. He has also helped negotiate multi-million dollar contracts for emission offsets.
While there are indications that change is needed now, some of the major challenges Nathan faces when developing long-term environmental policy are the volatility of environmental regulations and the constraints of a competitive market.
His program, called Foresight, creates a range of environmental risk scenarios and evaluates them up to 50 years into the future. Nathan says: “It takes a unique individual to do a 50-year forecast. You know you are going to be wrong, it’s just knowing how wrong you are going to be!”
Currently, Nathan works for TransAlta as senior manager of sustainable development, where his engineering analytical skills, as well as his business and negotiating skills, are helping shape the company’s long-term development policies.
Two Among Many
These are two engineering grads driving social change — one promoting market-based
thinking in a social organization, the other promoting social values in a market
economy.
Yet they’re representative of many more of us, those hybrids who go well
beyond the traditional technical roles to become agents of social change. Others
of us, Canadian professionals in Alberta or Africa, fall in the broad spectrum
of leaders of social change as represented by Danny and Nathan.
We tend to be political moderates, making small-step changes in our consumer
product and service choices, our employer choices and our lifestyle choices,
as we help usher in a more sustainable and fair global society.
Wherever you are in the spectrum of social entrepreneurship, the first step is being conscious of your position and working to ensure that engineers are effective in creating positive change.
The EWB Calgary Professional Chapter will hold a local conference on March 16-17. Visit the link provided with this story for more information.
more info
Engineers Without Borders
www.ewb.ca
EWB — Calgary Professional Chapter
www.calgary.ewb.ca
EWB — University of Alberta Chapter
www.ualberta.ewb.ca
EWB — University of Calgary Chapter
http://ucalgary.ewb.ca
Young Environmental Professionals Canada
www.yepcanada.ca
Canadian Centre for Social Entrepreneurship
www.business.ualberta.ca/ccse
Sustainable Practice Action Network
http://sustainablepractices.
blogspot.com
Social Entrepreneurs IDEAS Challenge
www.csef.ca
Blog about Danny Howard’s
EWB placement
http://dannyinmalawi.blogspot.com
CUTLINES for photo (battery powered):