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?”
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.
EWB organisations worldwide unite in call for professional engineering competencies reform
With just ten years to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals, international branches of Engineers Without Borders, including Engineers Without Borders Australia, are uniting to call for a professional engineering competencies reform. The organisations are united...
Student research leads to award-winning thesis
In 2019, as a final year Systems Engineering student at the Australian National University (ANU), Liam Highmore was accepted into EWB’s Research Challenge – the final-year offering in the EWB Challenge series. EWB’s unique research approach collaborates with community...
EWB wins award for engineering education excellence
The Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) has recognised EWB and its University partners team for engineering excellence for the Humanitarian Design Summits in the Engineering Education Engagement category. The awards, presented at the AAEE Annual...
How terrible traffic lights led Hannah to an Influencer Fellowship
When Hannah was seven years old, she had a massive pet hate. Traffic lights. Being driven around in the backseat of the family car, the need to stop at a traffic light was always a source of frustration. Why did you need to wait for so long? There’s no traffic coming,...
The volunteers that mobilise our volunteers!
Throughout 2020 our in-country overseas volunteering program was halted due to COVID-19. But it hasn’t hampered our ability to support our community programs. This is where our newly recruited mobilisation team has come to the fore. Coordinating a range of projects,...
In rural Cambodia, co-designed technology gives better access to livelihoods
The Agrilab works with communities of people with disability in rural areas of Cambodia to co-design technology that gives them better access to agricultural livelihoods. A total of 79% of Cambodia’s 16.5 million people live in rural areas, with most engaging in...
Announcing new project – ‘Reimagining Pathways’
A new project aims to explore how EWB Australia can support the growth of First Nations STEM leaders of the future. EWB believes that to solve the challenges faced by the world today and into the future, engineering must be redefined as a socio-technical profession....