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COMMUNITY-ORIENTED DESIGN AND EVALUATION PROCESS FOR SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE
Impact/Purpose:
The mission of Lafayette College’s Chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB-LC) is to provide sustainable infrastructure solutions in the Yoro Region of Honduras using multidisciplinary student groups. Such an effort matches service-learning with the sustainable development of small-scale infrastructure projects in another country; however, accomplishing such a service-learning effort can be difficult for new college chapters. For an infrastructure project to be sustainable throughout its life-cycle, designers must understand all of the constraints including economic, environmental, social, as well as technical. At the same time, college design teams are limited in terms of travel to developing countries, understanding new cultures including language, and experience applying knowledge to real-world situations.
Based on our previous experience, EWB-LC used the P3 Phase One project to develop an organizational framework for such service-learning projects. We call it the Community-Oriented Design and Evaluation Process for Sustainable Infrastructure (hereafter referred to as the CODE-PSI). The six steps of CODE-PSI are: Step 1– Establish Project and Determine Overall Goals; Step 2– Site Assessment and Planning; Step 3– Sustainability Evaluation of Alternatives and Community Buy-in; Step 4– Implementation; Step 5– Checking and Corrective Action; and Step 6– Review. The phase one P3 project allowed us to test CODE-PSI in a real-world setting within the communities of La Fortuna and Tule.
Site-specific challenges in La Fortun-Tule include: steep, erodable terrain with limited vehicular access; a scattered settlement pattern within the community; a high quality stream and riparian habitat; water rights issues; and the need for communal-based governance and financing. Our solution includes access to water and sanitation, an improved watershed via sani
The mission of Lafayette College’s Chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB-LC) is to provide sustainable infrastructure solutions in the Yoro Region of Honduras using multidisciplinary student groups. Such an effort matches service-learning with the sustainable development of small-scale infrastructure projects in another country; however, accomplishing such a service-learning effort can be difficult for new college chapters. For an infrastructure project to be sustainable throughout its life-cycle, designers must understand all of the constraints including economic, environmental, social, as well as technical. At the same time, college design teams are limited in terms of travel to developing countries, understanding new cultures including language, and experience applying knowledge to real-world situations.
Based on our previous experience, EWB-LC used the P3 Phase One project to develop an organizational framework for such service-learning projects. We call it the Community-Oriented Design and Evaluation Process for Sustainable Infrastructure (hereafter referred to as the CODE-PSI). The six steps of CODE-PSI are: Step 1– Establish Project and Determine Overall Goals; Step 2– Site Assessment and Planning; Step 3– Sustainability Evaluation of Alternatives and Community Buy-in; Step 4– Implementation; Step 5– Checking and Corrective Action; and Step 6– Review. The phase one P3 project allowed us to test CODE-PSI in a real-world setting within the communities of La Fortuna and Tule.
Site-specific challenges in La Fortun-Tule include: steep, erodable terrain with limited vehicular access; a scattered settlement pattern within the community; a high quality stream and riparian habitat; water rights issues; and the need for communal-based governance and financing. Our solution includes access to water and sanitation, an improved watershed via san
Description:
We met our first objective by completing the physical infrastructure of the La Fortuna-Tule water and sanitation project using the CODE-PSI method. This physical component of the project was important in providing a real, relevant, community-scale test case for the methods that were the main focus of the grant proposal.
We met our second objective by successfully implementing the final steps of the seven-step CODE-PSI in La Fortuna and Lagunitas and implementing steps one and two in El Convento. Since the development of CODE-PSI we have revised our set of manuals to include information on hygiene, shock chlorination, and watershed protection. The main changes made were to the community assessment questionnaire where additional multiple-choice answers were added in order to provide a method for a quantitative evaluation of the community. Also, the addition of a template into which the answers will be inserted to allow for a consistent method of calculating responses was recommended.
We successfully met our third objective by developing a method for sharing information for similar project teams to have a successful and tested method of creating rural water and sanitation systems.