UA Student Engineers To Fix Water Supply In West African Village

Members of the UA chapter of Engineers Without Borders will spend two weeks in West Africa in August to repair a broken mechanical water pump and conduct site assessments.
By Louis Woofenden, College of Engineering, July 16, 2010

Members of the University of Arizona chapter of Engineers Without Borders are traveling to West Africa to work on a project that will provide plentiful, clean water to the people of Mandoli in Mali.

During the two-week trip in August, EWB-UA president Lauren Case and EWB-UA Mali project manager Patrick Mette, both civil engineering seniors, will team up with four members and an adviser from the EWB chapter at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The group also will partner with Scott Lacy, a professor of anthropology at Emory University who has extensive experience in Mali. He first visited as a Peace Corps volunteer, and returned in 2002 on a Fulbright scholarship while completing his doctorate at UCSB. He later founded African Sky, a community development non-profit that tackles Africa's endemic poverty and inequality.

Group members will travel to Mandoli, the site of EWB-UA's current project on improving water resources. While in Mandoli, they will repair a broken mechanical water pump and conduct site assessments.

Members of EWB-UA believe this partnership will build a better understanding of how to support the community of Mandoli.

"Our partnership with UCSB and Dr. Lacy is an incredible opportunity for our chapter," said Case. "Dr. Lacy's insight regarding the people of Mali, as well as the UCSB team's knowledge of the pump we will be working to fix, will be invaluable to the advancement of our work in Mandoli."

Mette said he's looking forward to doing detailed assessments of the various projects that EWB-UA will complete over the coming years. He's also excited that the group will be working on the Mandoli pumping system, which hasn't worked for some time.

"Our priority is to fix the village pump," Mette said. "It will address their needs for water quantity, quality and accessibility."