Impact Stories
Making change happen across Australia and Asia Pacific.
Volunteer adventures in Vanuatu: Sadia’s life-changing year abroad
When Sadia Abdullah arrived in Vanuatu, the first thing she noticed was the heat and the humidity. The second was how friendly everyone was, and the strong sense of community.
Sadia flew into Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, in August 2022. Months earlier, she was at home in Sydney under tight COVID restrictions and eager to go anywhere outside her living room. Now, just a three-hour flight from Sydney, she was in beautiful Vanuatu, a country she knew almost nothing about a few months prior — just “that it was a dot in the Pacific”. Vanuatu is an archipelago of 83 islands with a population of around 300,000 people, located east of Australia on a similar latitude to Cairns.
Volunteer adventures in Vanuatu: Sadia’s life-changing year abroad
When Sadia Abdullah arrived in Vanuatu, the first thing she noticed was the heat and the humidity. The second was how friendly everyone was, and the strong sense of community.
Sadia flew into Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, in August 2022. Months earlier, she was at home in Sydney under tight COVID restrictions and eager to go anywhere outside her living room. Now, just a three-hour flight from Sydney, she was in beautiful Vanuatu, a country she knew almost nothing about a few months prior — just “that it was a dot in the Pacific”. Vanuatu is an archipelago of 83 islands with a population of around 300,000 people, located east of Australia on a similar latitude to Cairns.
Remote field visits, tuk-tuk commutes, and fish amok: a year in the life of an Australian volunteer
Water, risk, and sustainability engineer Nicole Locke had always wanted to work overseas but there had never been a good time to do it. She graduated into a difficult job market and was lucky enough to find a position with Water Corporation in Perth. Fast forward a few years to 2019 and Nicole was considering her next move.
“I was talking to a mentor and she said, you’ve always thought about going overseas and volunteering,” Nicole said. “’Why don’t you just do it?’ I thought—well, why not?”
Jumbo Jars ready for when the heavens open
Half of Cambodia’s rural population - more than six million people - lack access to clean water. It’s a combination of two main issues. One is climate change, which has brought about significant drought. The other is an unreliable supply of clean water, due to unsafe...
Seeking solutions to acceptance of female engineers in Timor-Leste
A new report aims to highlight the challenges and explore solutions to the barriers that female engineers face in Timor-Leste – of which there are many. Feto Enginhera was formed in 2014 to support the technical and engineering careers of women in Timor-Leste. Less...
In the workshop with FREO2
EWB established a partnership with FREO2 in June this year, aiming to further develop and scale technology for children and newborns who catch pneumonia or suffer acute breathing troubles - a key cause of death in developing countries. Over the past six months, EWB's...
The 2020 Danny Awards
Each year the Danny Awards, named after EWB founder Danny Almagor, recognises those in our volunteer network who have made an outstanding contribution to EWB’s mission. The 2020 awards were held online on Thursday December 17 2020. Here are the winners...Leader &...
Mobilising the Accessible Moto v2.0
Over the past year as EWB Australia initiated its new mobilisation program which matches volunteers with specific real-world projects to support EWB’s work. To launch the program, we identified three distinct streams: Open Challenges - such as the BirthWatch project...
BirthWatch – from open challenge to mobilised design
Open Challenges are a mechanism that forms part of EWB Australia’s new Mobilisation program. An Open Challenge focuses on a discrete part of a real-life engineering problem, allowing our network to engage in crowd-sourced ideation, creativity and innovation. The...
The EWB Challenge Showcase 2020 – it’s a wrap!
The EWB Challenge Showcase for 2020 has wrapped up three days of online hosted pitches, presentations and webinars, celebrating the hard work of over 10,000 university students. Our partner for this year, the Centre for Appropriate Technology (CfAT), has been inspired by student ideas and insights, some of which may influence our technology development work into 2021, which we will be looking at together soon. All student project reports, summaries and pitches from the EWB Challenge are shared with CfAT – and the EWB team will be looking at them with CfAT to explore what’s next.
Vanuatu: World First Disposable Nappy Ban
Engineers Without Borders Australia (EWB) is working with local organisation, Mama’s Laef and Vanuatu’s Ministry of Health to implement Vanuatu’s world first disposable nappy ban. Vanuatu is setting out to become the first nation to ban disposable nappies. With an estimated 20,000 babies and toddlers on Vanuatu’s 65 islands, disposable nappies are the single largest contributing item to waste in Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila. And their disposal in rural and remote areas is handled in ways that sometimes are as potentially damaging to a communities’ health as open defecation. Which is where EWB’s Tumble Drum Project comes in. A prototype will be rolled out in 2021 in order to test the design, iterate, and ultimately scale the non-electric technology.