 Good morning. Good afternoon or good evening to everyone, depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to engineering for change or you per se for short. Today, we're pleased to bring you our monthly first seminar series, which is spearheaded by me engineering for global development research committee for the purpose to actually develop the field of engineering for global development. Each month we have been hosting new research institutions to learn more about their work in advancing and sustainable development goals and global development more broadly. Today's seminar is with Dr. Evan Thomas, and we'll hear a little bit more about him, his group's work later in the seminar. 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The Innovate for Impact Seaman's Design Challenge aims to nurture breakthrough ideas and apply human-centered design to engineer innovative hardware solutions that help achieve SDGs 2 and 6 by 2030. I'll learn more and sign up on our website. The URL is listed. Applications are open now to all E4C members. Given the current pandemic or the deadline for submissions has been extended through May 4. I encourage all of you to apply. Now, with that, I just a couple of housekeeping items before we get started. As always, we like to take a practice round with using our WebEx platform. So we invite you now to type in your location into the chat window. Some of you have already done this. Obviously, have been part of these seminars before we have folks from Cameroon, from Sweden. I see folks from New Jersey a little closer to home in North Carolina, New York City, Barcelona, Portugal, Alaska. Well, that's the first one. Welcome Alaska. Kathmandu, the Rockaways in New York, Kenya, Ghana, Ghana, and from Turkey, Nigeria, Dayton, Ohio. Welcome everyone. We're so pleased to have you here. Welcome Ann Arbor, welcome. So with that in mind, do please put your questions into the Q&A window, which is right below the chat window. If you do not see the chat or the Q&A windows, please take a look for the two icons that are located in the bottom in the middle of the slide to have those open up for you. I see some answers coming up in the Q&A window. Welcome friends. If you have any comments that you would like to share with your fellow attendees, please use the chat window for that purpose. Questions for our speakers today, we invite you to please put them into the Q&A window so we can keep track of those. If you have any issues with Webex during this time, please make sure to email our admin. The engineering between admin can be directly I am in the chat window, and if you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start, and you may also want to try opening up Webex in a different browser. So with that and those instructions, and again, welcome everyone from Mombasa to Pakistan to Montreal. We're very pleased to have you here. I am pleased to introduce our presenter today, Dr. Evan Thomas, who is the director of the Mortensen Center in Global Engineering and holds the Mortensen Endowed Chair in Global Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. He's a tenured associate professor, jointly appointed in the Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department, and an affiliate faculty in the Environmental and Occupational Health of the Colorado School of Public Health. Evan is currently a member of the NASA and USAID Survey or Applied Sciences team. He's a PhD in Aerospace Engineering Sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder and is a registered professional engineer, as well as having a master's in public health from the Oregon Health Institute. Science University. We're honored that he is also the co-chair of the ASME, Engineering for Global Development Research Committee, and really thrilled to turn it over to Evan to share his insights. All right, Evan, I'm going to pass over controls to you. And then I also want to introduce today's moderator, Dr. Jesse Austin Brenneman. You, if you've joined the series before, you would have heard his bio and I will spare you from reading it. It is also equally extensive and illustrious and you can see on the slide right now. And Jesse is going to take us through the Q and A session and provide his insights as well. So with that, I turn it over to Evan. Thanks, John. Thanks, Jesse. It's a pleasure to work with both of you and to speak with all of our attendees today virtually. I'm going to share a little bit today about how do we measure impact in global engineering and even before that, what is global engineering? What does it mean to be an engineer working to address global challenges of poverty reduction? Both these persistent challenges of access to safe water, safe sanitation, safe infrastructure, safe energy, but then also how some of these global changes, including climate change and COVID-19 are impacting some of these communities around the world. And what's our role as engineers in trying to assist with solutions? This is our world. I'm sure this looks very familiar to everyone. What's neat about this is it's not a graphic. It kind of looks like a graphic. It's actually a picture. It's a bunch of stitched satellite imagery of everywhere on Earth on a cloud-free day. But we all can see where each of you are around the world on this map. Here's another way of looking at the planet. So you see two different images here. One is electricity lights. So you see in North America and in Europe, and you can see the Nile did up in North Africa. You can see India and China outlined. That's where there's electricity use and it's contributing to lights that you can see from space. But then the more orange colors or the more red colors, those are biomass fires. So some of those are forest fires. But most of what you see there are people cooking with wood fuel and charcoal. We still today, even in 2020, about half the world's population still uses firewood for their daily energy needs. And many of those people live in the global south and in particular, sub-Saharan Africa. And this contributes to some of the leading, persistent causes of illness and death globally. We have one of the leading causes of illness and death is respiratory disease, which is tied to both indoor and outdoor air pollution. We still have over a billion people in the world that lack access to safe drinking water. Two billion people that don't have safe sanitation. And many of these people live in areas of the world where climate change is making these problems worse. So in sub-Saharan Africa, you're seeing a early effects of climate change. You're seeing increased variability in rainfall. So wet places are getting wetter, but dry places are also getting drier. So drought that used to happen in East Africa maybe every five or 10 years is now effectively every single year. We also have rainfall variability. So rains coming at different times of the year, which impacts crop yields. So crop failure is increasing and risk of famine and food insecurity is increasing and water insecurity is increasing. Climate change is also impacting disease. Malaria has killed more people in human history than any other single cause. And the one saving grace in malaria is that the parasite, which lives inside mosquitoes, couldn't live above about 5,000 feet. So population centers like Nairobi, Kenya actually evolved, came into being because people realized they weren't sick from malaria. And now just within the past few years, as the average mean surface temperature warms, there's now persistent and chronic malaria in Nairobi and other major cities around the world. So we're actually seeing disease patterns being resurgent and changing. This is another way of looking at the planet. These are aerosols. So you see here in Africa, a lot of these aerosols are associated with biomass cook stoves and charcoal stoves in North America. A lot of those will be forest fires in North Africa. Those are dust storms and out in the ocean you see typhoons and hurricanes. So one question that we have often as engineers and as development practitioners is simple. Is development working? Is the entire field of global development, which includes nonprofit organizations like engineers of borders all the way up to multilaterals like the World Bank and UNICEF or national entities like USAID. All of this energy and activity and professional work poured into poverty reduction. Is it working? Are people getting healthier? Are they getting wealthier? Are we strengthening economies? So one thing you look at is disease and morbidity and mortality. So this chart here is global mortality among children under five over the past basically 25 years. And you can see that for every cause, mortality has decreased over the past 25 years. So respiratory infections have dropped precipitously. Diarrhea diseases, neonatal and preterm issues, malaria, HIV and AIDS, even though there's some bumps in the 2000s overall, those major causes of mortality among children are decreasing. So often you can look at this kind of data and say development isn't working. But the benefits are disproportionate. And I want to highlight that here up front because, you know, while it's important to be optimistic and it's important to want to contribute to some of the solutions. It's also important to be realistic about where these changes are actually happening and where chronic poverty is not necessarily being addressed. So here's another way of looking at the planet. These are CO2 emissions per capita. So you can see that the United States, even though China recently passed the United States as the biggest single emitter globally, by far the United States is the single greatest emitter per capita. Here in the United States, we use more CO2 and energy per person than anywhere else in the United States and the world. Plus, we've used more energy and had more CO2 emissions as a country in aggregate of any country in the world. But you can see that China, Russia, Europe, North Africa, North America, Australia are big users of energy and the associated emissions per capita. And Sub-Saharan Africa has practically no emissions per capita. So these are energy, this is energy use. Here's another map. This is the global burden of disease today. So these are the people in the world that have the greatest burden of disease per capita. And a lot of that disease burden, which is still environmentally, a lot of environmental hazards like air quality and water quality and sanitation and malaria and other diseases is happening in Sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the least developed countries in the world, about 50 out of the 70 least developed countries are in Sub-Saharan Africa. So you still see that there's a concentration of poverty and disease and a lack of economic activity is reflected in energy use in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is the proportion of populations with access to basic handwashing facilities. Now we don't have data for Europe or for North America or for much of South America. So the gray is indication of no data. So just look at where you see the color bars. This is data from the joint monitoring program indicating the proportion of households that have soap and water. In Kenya, about 10% of rural households have soap and water. In Ethiopia, 4% of rural households have soap and water. This is relevant right now. The main advice from the World Health Organization, the main advice from the CDC, the main advice from UNICEF on how we can slow and stop the spread of COVID-19 everywhere in the world is with regular handwashing with soap and water. And that is especially evident as the main intervention that is promoted in low and middle income countries. And yet people don't have soap and they don't have water. So there's emerging concern that if COVID does spread in Sub-Saharan Africa, it's going to spread very quickly without access to soap and water. 4% of rural Ethiopians have soap and water. 10% of rural Kenyans have soap and water. So this is morbidity, disease burden among all people in high income countries. So this is the top chart here is high income countries and the bottom chart is low income countries. I just want to point out that if you live in a high income country, the burden of disease are going to be things like heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, even things like back and neck pains. In low income countries, the burden of disease is highly skewed to environmental hazards, lower respiratory infections, which are correlated to air pollution, diarrhea, and malaria. And we're going to look at a similar chart, but only for deaths among children under 5. So if a baby is born in a high income country and he dies, it's likely going to be a neonatal, a preterm issue, or a congenital defect. If a baby is born and dies in a low income country, she likely is going to die of a respiratory disease or diarrhea or malaria again. And 99% of the deaths among children under 5 are in low income countries. So it is development working. On one hand, we can say that people are getting healthier, but on the other hand, you can say that we're not necessarily making progress among the lowest income countries. This is, again, 25 years of data of all the people in extreme poverty, which is living a less than $1.90 per person per day in equivalent purchasing power parity, which, by the way, is an extremely low number. Other statistics likely use numbers of less than $5 a day, and you suddenly start seeing that billions of people are still living a less than $5 a day, but still this illustrates something. So the number of people living a less than $1.90 a day has dropped from 2 billion people in 1990 to projected about 500 million people by 2030. But where is that progress happening? It's happening in India and China. India and China each have a billion people. For the vast majority of that progress are national economic activity and economic policies, which have brought people into the middle class and has been reflected in decreasing disease burden and increasing wealth. Southern here in Africa is increasing in the number of people in extreme poverty, and it's projected to continue to increase over the next 10 years. So I think it's very important that as development practitioners, we focus specifically on the question of whether or not our interventions are directly impacting poverty reduction. While as a world, as a planet, the number of people in poverty has been decreasing and wealth has been increasing, the focus of development priorities in large part remains in southern here in Africa, where we have a stubborn half a million people living in extreme poverty. So this is the world today. Some of you might have seen this chart before from Gapminder. We've used terms like low and middle income countries or global north and global south or an old term was third world countries. Of course, we don't use that anymore. None of those terms really make a lot of sense when you look at the spread of income and life expectancy in the world. So on the bottom is a long scale of income per capita income and on the X scale or on the Y scale, sorry, is life expectancy. And if you've seen Hans Rosling's animation of this data, the main case that he makes is that 200 years ago, everybody in the world and every country in the world was clustered in that lower left hand corner that everybody is poor and dive young. And that over 200 years, everyone has moved up to that level four area where you have high income and high life expectancy. But I want to point out in particular, look at that level one category and level one and two, it's up to here in Africa again, you still have that stubborn cluster of South African countries that are stuck in poverty. And again, this has been such the target of development policy and development practice that I think we need to evaluate if these interventions are contributing to this overall goal of increased health and wealth. One way of looking at this question is how much money is actually going into Sub-Saharan Africa. So this is data of financial flows into and out of Sub-Saharan Africa over the past 10 years. And up in this top chart, everything above zero are the total added up sources of money. So you can see that in purple remittances, these are people putting outside of their home country, sending money home. In that lighter blue, it's foreign aid. So this would be the World Bank and UNICEF and USAID. In darker blue, it's foreign investments. So it's corporations investing in industry and in economies. And then you can barely see it, that little green bar on the top, that's philanthropy. That's the Gates Foundation and everybody else like the Gates Foundation giving direct philanthropy to indigenous in Africa. I think there's a couple of things that are striking about this chart. The differences are just as big as foreign aid and philanthropy is actually pretty small. So even though foundations like the Gates Foundation have enormous influence in the development sector, their contribution is actually a tiny fraction of the financial flows into Africa. But that's flows of money into Sub-Saharan Africa. The bottom of the below zero in orange, this is debt interest payments. These are just interest on debt, not capital repayments, but just interest on largely World Bank debt getting repaid based on debt incurred in the 70s and 80s in Africa. So it almost basically wipes out foreign aid is having to send money back to the World Bank again. And then you have trade myth invoicing. That's in red traded myth invoicing and tax avoidance. These are those foreign corporations using tricks of the tax code to avoid paying taxes in these countries. And the overall effect of that is that while there might be a lot of economic activity, a lot of that activity is not being translated into income to national governments to provide basic services. So the government's not able to provide water, sanitation, energy, infrastructure, transportation, health care, education without a tax base. And that tax base is minimized through tax avoidance and trade myth invoicing. So if you take the net of all of this, these inflows and outflows, you get to about $20 billion a year going into Africa. Now that might sound like a lot of money. It's a lot more money than I have, but $20 billion a year is about $20 per person per year as the net investment of the rest of the world in Africa. It's really not very much money. It's about the budget of NASA, the EPA or USAID. So in aggregate, even though there's a lot of heat, there's not necessarily a lot of fire around economic development and investment in Sub-Saharan Africa. So that's the little bit of context setting. That's the world that we live in today. So what is the role of engineers in trying to address these chronic challenges? Historically, engineers have liked to work on a project or product level. We like to invent a new water filter or invent a new cook stove or do a project in the village like Rainwater Catchment. And that's been our contribution at least over the past 20, 30, 40 years is project and product level focus. But these are not solving these chronic underlying problems. A product is not solving the root cause of poverty in a village. And inventing another water filter does not address the reason why people don't have clean water. So as engineers, we need to elevate our contribution. We need to be more concerned with the determinants and causes and ultimately trying to address solutions to global poverty. So what do we mean by that? This is a non-comprehensive list, just a list of examples of where engineers can contribute. One is standards development, something that the professional societies like ASME have a really great history in is engineers coming together and saying, this is the criteria for water treatment. We're not going to let everybody invent a new way of doing this. We have to have certain standards for water quality, certain standards for air quality, certain standards for structures. System science, looking at systems level interventions, not just is a water filter working or is a water pump working, but what is the entire system behind water service delivery? Impact evaluation. Impact evaluation has been big in the past 15 years in the development sector, led by economists and by public health professionals. Engineers also have a role in designing experimentally rigorous evaluations to see if technologies and interventions are actually addressing problems on a long-term basis. Another example is instrumentation and remote sensing. Our team in particular focuses on this work. How can we use satellite data and sensor data to monitor food security, to monitor water security, and to use that information so that people can act on it to improve water and food security? Paper performance contracting. This might sound a little arcane, but a big area of emphasis today is how do we actually incentivize services? Let's not give money to a nonprofit to install another water pump. Let's incentivize delivery of water services and use contracting and monitoring mechanisms to ensure long-term support of service delivery. Professional graduate education. Of course, this is what Engineering for Change does in part, and what our programs here at the University of Colorado does, and along with a lot of other universities trying to train engineers to contribute to these global challenges. Of course, environmental health, those hazards of dirty air and dirty water and sanitation are not flowing away yet. We need to continue to innovate in that space. And structures and settlements. As engineers, how do we build safe housing, safe transportation for both developing areas as well as an emergency response? So how does this all come together in terms of actual intervention? This is a little infographic of how foreign aid flows today. Poverty often comes in as indicated on the left through organizations all the way from engineers' borders to the World Bank to go into projects that often have a technology, a water project, a cook stove project, an off-grid energy project that's designed to try to address a symptom of poverty, dirty water, dirty air, unsafe sanitation. But the lasting impact is often not there. About half of water and sanitation programs installed every year with foreign aid are broken within the first 18 months, and they often never get fixed. Now an engineer might say, well, I need to build a better water pump. But the economists and the public health people and the public policy people will say, we need to look at that entire system. We need to look at who's paying for water. Where are the subsidies? How do you professionalize this service? What are the supply chains? It goes way beyond training a local technician to fix a water pump. So how do we close this loop? How do we actually make sure that the impact, the long-term service delivery, is tied to the payment and to the performance of the service? This is the positive feedback loop we're trying to create. Where you have a water pump or a water service, you monitor that service. You use that monitoring data to enable maintenance activities. You go out and fix a water pump, and you tie that fix to payment. So you actually incentivize using money, payments for basic services and not for just coverage. I'm going to give you a few examples of how our team is trying to operationalize this. There's a number of different ways that we can measure things. So if we just look at water sanitation, the goal is improved health. The mechanisms for improved health is better water, better hygiene, better nutrition, better sanitation. The way we measure that is whether or not people have soap, whether or not people have access to water, what the quality of that water is, what the cost of that water is. But way out here, way outside these rings are how we actually measured this today. We use surveys and observations and sensors and test kits, and these are really not sufficient. In many ways we're not directly measuring the impact of a service on health, which is the actual goal. So this is Rwanda. I'm going to give a brief overview of one program that we have in Rwanda. Rwanda is still about 80% of people live outside of urban centers and are subsistence farmers using biomass, wood primarily for their daily energy needs. And that wood contributes to the emissions that you can see. Now, some people cook outside as in this picture, but many people will cook indoors and be exposed directly to that indoor air pollution. We ran a program over the past, a lot of people have been working in Rwanda for the past 16 years, starting with engineers on boarders all the way to a national health program that we ran over the past few years, where we provided interventions and behavior change messaging to address the two leading environmental health hazards, dirty water and dirty air. So we provided cooksthoes and water filters covering about 2 million people in Rwanda, combined that with public health behavior change messaging, continuous engagement with households, and a financing model that let us pay for this using private finance and where you were incentivized to continue upkeep and monitoring of the program through revenues that were earned under carbon finance, which I won't spend too much time on today. I'll spend more time just talking about the intervention itself. So this is Rwanda. Over on the left side in yellow and blue, you see the western province of Rwanda and on the green side, a couple of northern districts in the eastern province. In 2014 through 2016, we reached about 2 million people with water filters and cooksthoes covering the entire western province of Rwanda and the eastern province of Rwanda, the poorest households in each of those regions. And we ran a randomized control trial to evaluate if the program impacted water quality, air quality, and health. So over the western province, the districts in yellow didn't receive the interventions at first, and we compared environmental health in both, compared between the yellow areas and the blue areas. So this is a cookstove. It's the EcoZoom Dura. It's a biomass cookstove that reduces, would feel used by about 50%, reduces indoor air pollution by about the same amount. By itself, that's not enough. The cookstove by itself actually doesn't reduce emissions enough to have a health benefit, nor is it viable if you don't combine it with behavioral messaging to discontinue use of the previous stove. So even something as simple as a stove actually needs regular engagement with households, so that you don't accidentally or unwittingly increase emissions and increase fuel use. Many people will get a new stove like this and use it in addition to their baseline stove, which can have the effect of increasing emissions, increasing fuel use. Plus, if you use the stove indoors, you don't really reduce indoor air pollution enough to have a health benefit. So we had to do a lot of messaging to get people to use the stove exclusively and to get them to use it outdoors. And this is the water filter, the Lystra Family 2.0. Great water filter. It eliminates microbial contaminations of a highly protective rating of the WHO, but by itself, that's not enough. It needs maintenance. It needs regular cleaning. It also needs to be used exclusively. If people combine use of clean water from the Lystra with dirty water that they're getting from other sources, you can actually lower a natural or an acquired immune response. I make people sicker. So again, a water filter by itself is not necessarily a breakeven proposition. It can cause problems if you're not careful. So this is how we ran the distributions. This is a partnership between Austin the Ministry of Health and Rwanda. It was called the Bayonasa. It means to live well. We had about 900 community health workers working with us across 7,500 villages, distributing these products and engaging in households. We had a radio signal single on the radio stations that everybody knew across Rwanda for a couple of years. So this was all part of our behavior change messaging. We also provided messaging directly in homes. Every one of our community health workers went door-to-door repeatedly over a couple of years to train people in use of the stove and water filter to maintain and fix and replace the necessary of the products and to customize the use for that particular household. So on the right, this is a poster that was provided that was customized. Community health worker, Turkish Sharpie, would fill out the poster to customize it for that particular home. And the home signed a contract between themselves and their local elected cell secretary agreeing to participate in the program and to use the products and not sell them or give them away. We also measured use using innovative methods. So this is one of our sensors that we installed directly inside both the stoves and water filters. And what we were interested in doing is measuring if people actually use the stoves and filters. Plus, we wanted to know if the sensors themselves caused any reaction among households. And for the water filters, we saw a pretty dramatic impact. Using survey data, which is currently the most common and most widely used method for evaluating things like water filter interventions, people report using about a liter and a half per person per day, which is also exactly the right answer. When people know a sensor is watching them or is in their water filter, they're using about a liter a day. And when people don't know that a sensor is there, which is our best estimate of actual behavior, it's only about half a liter a day. So we see big reactivity. We see a disparity between survey data and what people actually do. But we also see a big difference between what happens when people know a sensor is there versus when they don't know a sensor is there. So we've expanded on this recently. This is an ongoing study applied to cook stoves in Rwanda, where we took advantage of the fact that we'd actually use sensors to cause people to engage in healthier behaviors and adapted it from monitoring indoor air pollution. This on the right is a indoor air pollution sensor, a PM 2.5 sensor that monitors air quality. And it shows that air quality in as a kind of a barometer in the child's lungs here on a scale that goes up to the WHO 24-hour mean exposure for particulate matter. Then when we detect a cooking event, if we detect people using a indoor cook stove, a biomass cook stove, it plays an alarm. Now, it's not like this is basically a smoke detector, but it's not a smoke detector alarm. It's number one in drums that were recorded. It's a behavioral reminder and nudge to use a clean cook stove indoors. So in aggregate, this program had a big effect on health in Rwanda. We nearly doubled the number of households with clean water. We reduced indoor air pollution by 73%. We reduced diarrhea among children under 5% by 30% and respiratory disease by 25%. And in aggregate, we're able to estimate that about 90 children, we avoid their death every year that the program is running. And we save 7,500 disability-adjusted life years. So 7,500 years of loss of avoided illness in aggregate across the program. So there's a few other mechanisms that I'm going to explain now that we use in other contexts. So we tie things like interventions, environmental health interventions to payment systems, carbon credits, health credits, paper performance impact funds, as well as instrumentation using things like sensors to monitor an intervention and to try to create that closed loop where service delivery is incentivized. I'm going to go through just a couple of the quick examples of what we've done this. We use sensors to monitor latrines. This is Sanergy's operation in Kenya. They're a franchise-based sanitation model in urban areas in Nairobi. We put sensors in these franchise toilets to monitor fill rates of the toilets and to help franchise operators communicate with Sanergy to ask them to come and service the latrines. We've used these same sensors in India to try to monitor behavior and to try to correlate that to health outcomes and we found over and over again that what people actually tell us that you do is not really what they do with sanitation behaviors. We've also linked this type of data to sanitary inspection. Sanitary inspections are a survey tool to monitor to estimate risk of exposure to microbial contamination at water points or at other kinds of wash interventions. We've actually shown that sanitary inspections have almost no predictive power for water contamination. So we're trying to influence the measurement tools that are used in the sector today. And we're using this across infrastructure as well not just environmental health but environmental resilience. This is a program where we are evaluating run by Bridges Prosperity. Bridges Prosperity puts in pedestrian footbridges that link isolated communities to things like clinics and schools and hospitals and most importantly markets. And we are running the impact evaluation where we're looking at things like health and homes, we're measuring market access, we're measuring livelihoods like increased wage earnings, we're even measuring bridge use. So we have cameras monitoring bridge use and we're correlating that to these health and livelihood outcomes. And then one of our biggest initiatives now is DRIP. It's called the Drowed Resilience Impact Platform where we're trying to help reduce and ultimately end drought emergencies in East Africa. About a quarter of the world's population is facing increased water insecurity and as I mentioned earlier at the top of the presentation, in East Africa in particular, drought is essentially an annual occurrence now and they're becoming more severe and more frequent in part thanks to climate change. This is a very arid region of the world where people used to use surface water but are now increasingly reliant on groundwater sources. So they're drilling holes in the ground to extract water as a resilience effort during times of extreme drought. So that's what you see here. These are from Northern Kenya. We're operating across Northern Kenya and across Northern and Eastern Ethiopia monitoring groundwater supplies and trying to improve drought resilience through the maintenance of these water systems. So what happens is during the rainy seasons, people will get water from streams and rivers and holding ponds and other rainwater catchment tools, methods. During the dry season, people will migrate to these groundwater sources and access water from these pumps and these storage tanks. But often these systems are broken. About 40% of them are broken in the middle of the drought and it's not necessarily because the groundwater supply runs dry. A lot of these are deep aquifers. They're ancient water. So it's actually the infrastructure itself that breaks and that can lead to a drought emergency where people are displaced, livestock die and crops fail. So our effort, I'm just going to skip ahead because I just mentioned this piece, our effort is trying to link groundwater management to drought resilience. Sorry, I'm just going to jump ahead here to our theory of change. We like monitoring of food and water security. So we have sensors monitoring groundwater pumps. We have satellites monitoring food security and rainfall. And we create models that can forecast groundwater demand and forecast drought. Our partners include the Faminer of the Warning System, the Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development in Nairobi, and we're part of the NASA and USAID severe program, which is about linking satellite data to decision aids in low-middle income settings. So we're taking all of our sensor data and the satellite data, creating models that forecast food security and water security, and then engage in pay-for-performance contracting where we pinpoint activities where we need to go and fix water pumps before the drought happens. We've done this before. These systems that we're currently monitoring are big borehole systems, and we've done this across examples like hand pumps. These are hand pumps in Kenya and Ethiopia where we installed sensors to monitor those hand pumps and actually tell us when a hand pump is broken so you can go out and fix it. The idea is the sensor is monitoring the pumps and identifies that a pump is broken and you deploy a technician to go and fix it. We've seen a huge impact on water point functionality. Typically, these hand pumps are broken about half the year. They're broken for about 200 days, any given failure. On average, a group of pumps are about only about 50% of them are working. We were able to get about 90% functionality and get repair intervals from 200 days down to 20 days proactively using sensor data to go out there and make a repair. So now we're doing this at scale. This is a map of the Hornet Africa. Every one of these dots is a groundwater supply serving on average about 5,000 people each, and we have a satellite-connected sensor monitoring every single one of those water points on a continuous basis, and we're linking that data to local operators, local governments, local ministries of water, but also national entities like the National Drought Management Authority and international entities like UNICEF and USAID who can collectively act to try to improve water security. This is not some simple story of a local community locally maintaining a water pipe. Water is subsidized for everybody in the world, including everybody on the phone call, and this area of the world is some of the most resource constrained and feeling the earliest impacts of climate change. So this isn't about making a local community fully maintain their water supply. It's about aligning incentives and responsibility, accountability collectively to make sure that people have access to water during drought. The colors that are underneath the map are the same in early warning systems, food security classification for the same region. So we also see the direct relationship between climate change, rainfall, and groundwater demand. We've seen this across the region. We're currently monitoring about 3 million people's water supplies on a daily basis for the past four years. We have about 250,000 site days of data over the past four years. It's a big data set. And we're able to compare the use and function of those groundwater pumps to climate variability like rainfall. And we see that as rainfall decreases, there's increasing demand on groundwater resources. So that's where we are putting our focus. So just in conclusions, we have time for questions. The point of measurement and improved and continuous measurement doesn't exist in the vacuum. Data by itself is not that interesting unless it's actionable and unless it's acted upon. And for it to be acted upon, you also have to care about the incentives. So I am an engineer, and I like working on things like sensors, but I have to know about contracting. I have to know about policy. Our team has to be engaged in those conversations. We don't just throw it over the fence to an economist or throw it over the fence to a policy person. But by the way are also domain experts. This idea that engineers can stay in our engineering lane is kind of silly when the economists like to talk about engineering and the public policy people like to talk about public health. We need to be at those same conversations, at those same tables, bringing in our expertise, but also calibrating our contribution against what is actually needed to address the underlying causes of poverty, not just the symptoms. All right, thanks. I'm happy to take some questions. Thank you, Evan. It's very valuable. Jesse, I invite you to take a story discussion. So just as a note, I've been taking some notes on the questions that have been coming in in the Q&A. As I'm asking, I'm trying to synthesize those into a few questions for Evan right now. Evan, thanks again for really an inspiring talk. Always read your papers. And then just to see it all in this one sort of comprehensive bigger picture view is really great, especially within the context you said at the beginning. A lot of the questions, so as I'm asking, please continue to write in the Q&A, and I'll try and address those as we move forward. One of a lot of the questions come up around building this team you just talked about in your conclusion, having all of these ministries, it's a large cost to be able to do this sensor and evaluation over years, multiple years as you're talking about. How do you build that team and convince that team or at least get consensus among the team that this type of evaluation is necessary or what is the best way to do it, right? So you talked about both disciplines, but also across organizations, right? And countries. So what does that look like for you? So everything I described today is our consortium efforts. Each of the examples I provided had many different organizations involved. I'm just speaking about some of those projects, but we're not doing all of that work as just our organization. If I just use DRIP as an example, DRIP itself as a concept is a number of different USAID programs funded through a number of different implementers, including the Millennium Water Alliance in Kenya and Lowland Wash in Ethiopia. We have NASA funding some of the technical work. We have the National Science Foundation funding some of the instrumentation work. So a lot of this is about putting the pieces together from different funding sources and with different organizations towards a common goal. In terms of convincing anybody, generally people don't need much convincing that we should increase our focus on service delivery. The big challenge has been changing the incentives. When historically big funding agencies fund infrastructure, you'll have smart professionals and engineers who are there saying, yeah, I know I'm building a pump that's going to break in two years, but that's the contracting mechanism. So it's less about convincing people that these are challenges and more about trying to offer collaborative ways to change the status quo. So introducing new ideas, introducing instrumentation, introducing pay-for-performance contracting. And while we have had some successes in our team and there's lots of great processing work out there, everything here is a work in progress. We have not ended drought emergencies in the Horn of Africa. We're monitoring a lot of water supplies right now. I can't prove to you that we improved water security yet. So these are long-term efforts that require some, frankly, some courage on the part of the implementers and funders to support. And I think the other thing that's challenging, Jesse, is this balance between wanting to be innovative and the rewards we get in our sector around innovation and also not being too fickle. And we also know how to deliver water. And it doesn't take another invention to do that. So how do I resolve that in my head? Our sensors, while being innovative and introducing this technology in the sector, the purpose of them is to help get the water pumps fixed. By themselves, they don't do anything. So there's a tricky balance there between innovation and doing the hard, long, expensive work of delivering basic services. We've looked for gimmicks and products and innovations for a long time to solve poverty, and we've avoided making the expensive, necessary investments to ensure service delivery in the same way that we do in higher-income countries. Sure, great. Yeah, I think that you rephrased my question exactly in the direction I was looking for. Could you speak a little bit more, someone who, let's say, is a researcher in a university or somewhere else? How do they go about building this? So you guys have a whole center, you have a whole group of people, these consultants, you have past relationships with. I guess could you talk us through sort of the trajectory or someone wanting to build something that ends up several years from now looking like drip, looking like one of these projects? How do they start and get on this process working with their local partners? They're working right now as you said in the status quo of I'm working with a village, I'm working with a community, I have one NGO I work with, right? How do they then, if we want to move everybody towards this more system-level impact and evaluation, how do we, what's the trajectory, what has the trajectory looked like for you and what would you suggest it to be for other people? I think that's what a lot of these questions have been asking. Yeah, I think, I wish I had a simple answer. I think that there's a few different things that come to mind. One is different institutions are good at different things. So in our program, sometimes we are the universities, sometimes we're a small company, sometimes we're a nonprofit, sometimes we're partnered directly with the government. So each of those types of institutions have different value and different skill sets they bring to the table. But it's also not necessary to, again, only stay in your lane. If you're an academic, it's okay to also be an entrepreneur and also work with a nonprofit. In fact, the counterpoint is that it can be quite limiting to only stay within your domain. If you're only going to stay in your world, you're not adding a lot to this other world. So it's important to not necessarily be a dilettante, but at least be conversant and have relationships in those other areas and be able to work with them. The other thing is that it takes a long time. I mean, any entrepreneur will tell you this. Like you come up with an idea that the starting point of an idea to address a problem in an actual product or a solution is way longer than anybody thinks. It's not one cycle of the eye show. It's not one cycle of an SBIR from the government. It's not one funding round. It's not one project. It takes a long time. Sweet Sense is our sensor spin-off company. We founded it in 2012. There's now been eight years that this company is still in startup mode. It might be because we're terrible at it, and it might also be because this stuff is kind of hard, and it takes a long time. And that iterative process sometimes also bumps up against the other modalities of foreign development, foreign aid development, where USAID wants you to write down your 30-step milestone Gantt chart two years before you start a five-year project. And that's not really how innovation and iteration works. And I'm not both of them that strengthen weaknesses, and they're both appropriate in different places. But sometimes you have to figure out how to play that game a little bit of different types of organizations contributing in different places. Yeah, I don't know. I'm forgetting the question, but hopefully it's just part of this. No, no, no, that's good. I think that, yeah, I think when I said convincing before, and then you took it in the direction I actually wanted to go in, was the idea of building this team of different organizations. How do you, as someone in a particular lane, go about getting to that seven-year time horizon where we now have a consortium of everybody that's all working together towards this objective? I agree that everyone has the same objective. I think that you guys have been very successful in building these teams. And I think that that is a little bit unusual when you look at the other players in these spaces, right, that are very much sort of in their own lanes as you're talking about. So breaking out of that, having the skills to be able to break out of that, one of the things I wanted to ask you was across disciplines, you were just talking about being conversant and other things. You talked about public health. You talked about development economics. How does someone who's a research engineer, let's say myself, you know, and wants to work with these other groups, they're asking different questions. They use different methods. How do I begin to become conversant in those other ways? What is the way you have found to be able to get these teams to work effectively together? So I think, you know, in our program in the Morton's and Centre in Global Engineering, we are trying to be very explicit upfront that our body of knowledge includes engineers knowing about development economics, knowing about public policy, public health, history, the history of colonialism all the way through the SDGs and not only jumping straight to, I'm going to build something. We still think it's good to build things and to invent and innovate and test and iterate, but they should be done in the context of solving underlying problems or generating new knowledge and not just symptoms. And if your symptoms are easy, it's easy to say this village doesn't have clean water. It's harder to talk about why and what can we do, what can we really be done about the why? So in my career, you know, I started as an engineer working on the symptom side and we realized quickly that that wasn't enough, that what really mattered was the health world and the public health and the global health community is a lot more sophisticated than the engineering community in terms of thinking about how they contribute to global poverty reduction. So our team started working closely with the public health world and doing a lot of our work within public health. Recently, we've also been working with economists and with public policy people as well and of course, government and teaching our students about those topics. We have a World Bank economist who teaches a class called Introduction to Development Economics for Engineers. You know, I got an MTH after my PhD in engineering so that I could talk with some legitimacy about how engineering and public health intersect with each other. That's great. And I think you've also touched on some of the questions on pedagogy and how do we have students be incorporated in this because we know there's a lot of energy and effort being with what you're talking about there at the Martinton Center. Could you maybe plug some of the things you guys are talking about? There's a lot of questions here about I'm an engineering teacher or professor and I want to raise my students' awareness. I want to move towards more of a model where we're talking about some of these other topics and concepts. Maybe you could talk about some of those efforts just briefly so that other people can connect with you on that topic. Yeah, and you know, for us this has been involving two over the years. Engineers of Borders USA was started here at the University of Colorado and I think many of you probably on this line are involved with EWB or have been in the past. It's how I got started too. But EWB is a great entry point for becoming aware of some of these issues. But we also need to not just work on a project level and we've been moving our pedagogy and our curriculum away from projects to trying to address the longer term issues as I mentioned before. So how do we actually do that with a student experience? You know, you don't just get to go play doctor in Africa on spring break as an undergrad and you shouldn't go play engineer in Africa on spring break either. We need to have gates, we need to have training, we need to have vetting, we need to have a professionalization of acting as engineers in global poverty reduction because messing with somebody's water system is just as risky as messing with somebody's health clinic. To do that we embed our graduate students with development agencies. At graduate level, a requirement of our program is a field practicum where all of our students or nearly all of our students are embedded with an international NGO or social enterprise or multilateral usually for three to six months to actually get work experience. On the one hand it kind of looks like an internship on the other hand it's a field experience and it's very different than designing and running your own project. Before you're ready for that we need to actually understand the state of the art and best practices in the sector. So that's a piece of what we're trying to do. At the same time we don't want to run off students. We're taking over here at the University of Colorado a freshman level residential program next year. We're going to have about 150 freshmen who are learning about these things for the first time and the goal is not to say to scare them into not doing anything is to try to put them on a track where they can best use their privilege and their technical skills towards addressing these long-term problems we have as a planet. That's amazing. Thank you so much for that. Iana, I think we're approaching the end here. We are. I'll end for your answers to the question and I'll switch it over to Iana for I'm actually going to if you allow me to liberty there is one question that came in that I think is a tricky one and you addressed to some extent, Evan, but this particular listener asks for non-profits, how do you balance this long-term process of change with any to show supporters that progress toward impact is being made? I think that is such a difficult balance. Evan, any reflections for us to close out the seminar on that particular fund? Yeah, I'll give three quick examples. One is Bridges' Prosperity. Bridges' Prosperity is one of our partners. They install pedestrian footbridges and they used to do a lot of this to volunteer organizations, student chapters professionals coming from industry and they still do some of that and they've been taking donations to build bridges all over the world. Avery Bang who is the CEO of Bridges Prosperity and Christina Barso, the Chief Operating Officer they pivoted in the past couple of years to try to focus on pay-by-results pay-for-performance contracting in a narrower geography so that they can go to scale. So today they're trying to go to scale in Rwanda putting in 300 pedestrian footbridges across Rwanda with the government paying for 40% of those costs investors paying for some of those costs and donors paying only after the bridges are not only completed but have been proven to have an impact. So actually paying for the impact and the performance of those bridges and for Avery and Christina and the rest of the Bridges Prosperity team they had to bring their donors along with that. They had to bring their volunteers along with that story a harder story, a longer story a more uncertain story but one that seems to have a much more significant impact longer term so that takes leadership and it takes commitment to doing it the hard way. Another example is Water for People. Eleanor Allen at Water for People and even in the recent history of that organization pivoted from the same thing projects all over the place that were focused on technical solutions to focusing on district level sustained water services. So they're working in fewer geographies fewer places with longer time to minutes to make sure that there's district scale water access and so they also had to convince their donors that this was the better way of doing it. Those are excellent examples and I think it's actually part of the golden rules for social entrepreneurship as well is to be laser focused and really bound the scope in concrete terms like these. So I want to thank you Evan I know we're all the time thank you to Jesse and I want to give a shout out to our upcoming seminar next month we'll be joined by Professor Amy Bilton from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto she'll be sharing some of the insights from their research group. They are also doing phenomenal work in this space and I encourage all of you to join us for that presentation. Thank you to everyone who's joined us today from all around the globe I know there's many questions that we didn't get to address directly we will share them with our presenters and certainly feel free to reach out to us or to the presenters they shared their contact information and with that I'd like to wish you a good morning good evening or good afternoon please stay safe wash those hands get access to soap if you're in a region there is lacking to stop the spread of COVID and we hope that you will join us on the next webinar have a good day everyone thank you thank you