WIP: Co-Designing Humanitarian Service-Learning Activities: Lessons from Semi-Rural Amazon Communities

In Fall 2022, a group of students from Engineers Without Borders student chapter at Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ designed a service trip to install water chlorinators in semirural Andean communities in Ecuador. The goal of the trip was to provide clean water by installing water chlorinator in a school of USFQ community, providing maintenance technical training and giving sanitation and hygiene training to the community. The key was to co-design the intervention with the community using Mazzurco and Jesiek principles to co-design such intervention. This study focusses in the lessons learned from the challenges and barriers students faced during the co-designing phase. Such lessons were recorded in a manual of best practices for future interventions in communities with similar contexts. This paper proposes the adaptation of the methodology to co-design humanitarian engineering interventions between students, faculty advisors, interested stake holders and communities. All of these for communities are located in the Andean mountains. The authors discuss the possible factors driving the results, the next steps and explore the avenues academia could take for future co-design service trips to semirural Andean communities. Implications for research and practice are provided.