From the water we drink and the food we consume to the buildings we live, work and play in, engineering touches all of our lives every day and has significantly contributed to human progress and wellbeing. However, engineering can have unintended consequences.

More than at any time in human history, the future is ours to shape. To build a better world we have to push beyond our existing frontiers. Business as usual is no longer an option.

At Engineers Without Borders UK, we’ve been working hard over the last 15 years to focus the attention of the engineering community on making the world a better place.

We’ve achieved a lot that we’re proud of:

  • We’ve supported partners in Africa, Asia and South and Central America to increase access to clean water, improved sanitation facilities, reliable energy resources and resilient built environments.
  • We’ve inspired young people to become engineers and harness their skills to achieve amazing feats.
  • We’ve evolved how engineers are educated, ensuring the engineers of tomorrow embed social and environmental responsibility into their engineering design.

However, the scale of the challenge we face is great and currently the engineering community isn’t ready to tackle it. To achieve this there must be a fundamental shift in the focus of engineering to ensure investment in skills and talent, that benefits our whole global community, not just a select few.

We want to capitalise on the enormous potential our growing movement has to offer, creating more opportunities to join our movement, furthering our knowledge in global responsibility in engineering. We will keep discussing how we can create change, and take action together to ensure that engineering is being used to address the global challenges we are being confronted with.

To achieve the scale of impact that is required, we need to recalibrate. In the coming months, we’ll be making changes to our website, clearly stating our mission, in addition to adding new opportunities to join our team. Due to the focus on clearly identifying our mission we have paused launching any new International placements in the coming year. We are taking the appropriate time explore a wider range of international collaboration opportunities ensuring we can support each project sufficiently to achieve the best outcome.

We’re laying solid foundations that will set us up to achieve our goals, and as a result provide more benefit to the global community.

By ensuring that we’re maximising our long-term collective potential – as members, partners, educators, companies, institutions, supporters, staff and trustees – we have a huge opportunity to develop a movement capable of delivering true change and giving the world the best that engineering has to offer.

If you’re already involved, stay connected and look out for the upcoming opportunities to help shape our journey. If you’re not, sign up today and join the movement leading the shift to globally responsible engineering.

Together, we can champion engineering for a better, brighter future.

If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you! Get in touch at [email protected].