Aspectos administrativos y legales

Dar es Salaam and Bagamoyo. Her analysis included considering the gaps in the supply of water to meet domestic water needs demands as well as the potential for using rainwater to fill this gap. The student was able to identify a number of case studies demonstrating that there are some people already benefiting from the use of rainwater. She assessed the materials and technologies used for existing rainwater harvesting in the existing applications and used this to identify the challenges that would have to be overcome to extrapolate this practice particularly within the low income community. The student used this to identify the social and economic barriers preventing the widespread adoption of rainwater harvesting in Bagamoyo and Dar es Salaam.

5. Discussion and Summary

The preceding sections have described a 3-year international research training program funded by the National Science Foundation. The focus of the project is giving undergraduate, Master’s and Ph. D. students an opportunity to acquire a global perspective on developing innovations that can make construction processes, products and services more sustainable using East Africa as the deployment context. The students spent 9 weeks in Tanzania or Kenya working closely with East African professors. The motivation for the initiative was creating a service learning platform that would prime future scientists and engineers for the challenges associated with globalization by 1) improving their

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understanding of contextual issues through international experiences 2) facilitating problem-focused and team-based learning and (3) developing new educational materials based on the students’ experience.

The program provided research training for 3 groups of US students between 2008 & 2010. The core of the training during each year of the program was a well-defined 9 week summer research activities hosted by professors from East African Universities. The foreign collaborators are presently engaging in research work in sustainability in the built environment within the context of low-income housing. The IRES students are hosted by these projects. Participation in the program also requires the students to propose sustainable low-income engineering solutions, given a budget typical for slum upgrading initiatives in East Africa. It was expected that because of financial resource constraints, the students learn techniques from local professionals and respond to local constraints through evaluating alternatives and making several trade-offs. Three cohorts of students have gone through the program. Their research findings demonstrate that they have learnt that if any scientific or engineering strategy is to be put forward as a model for global application, it is important to demonstrate that the proponents have considered the particular characteristics, trends, and challenges of the geographic, economic, cultural and political contexts in which they are located.

The approach adopted in the program can be replicated to provide international learning experience for science and engineering students from developing countries. A key constraint to providing international learning activities in any country is funding. It will be difficult for African universities to successfully create such programs without financial support from the government. In the author’s program external funding was provided through a program run by the Office for International Science and Engineering within the National Science Foundation (NSF, 2004). Although visits to neighboring countries could be a good place to start as it requires a small budget, there is great value in exposing students to radically different professional cultures. Even where external funding is provided, the budget is usually small. The author’s successful execution of the program described in this paper could not have been possible without her institution’s support. In addition to being given matching funds from the department, she was also able to tap into other university- based resources such grants from the International Center and the Center for African Studies. Any African institution’s commitment to globalization of higher education would greatly benefit from such instruments. The internal university grants actually played a key role in increasing the chances of securing external funding through enabling the author was able to conduct preliminary research reported in Honig and Obonyo (2006), Obonyo and Omenya (2006), Obonyo and Omenya (2006) and Obonyo and Wei (2007).

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The author continues to work with the foreign collaborators and they are cautiously optimistic that in future they will be able to provide internal research training opportunities for East African undergraduate students. Immersing these students in a problem solving setting within an international context will enable them to develop a global perspective on techniques that will greatly fast track them to success in the work as future professionals.

Acknowledgements

This project is supported by NSF Grant #0755959 from the OISE. PI: Esther Obonyo, CO-PI Robert Ries. The author acknowledges the contribution of University of Nairobi and Ardhi University.

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3. NSF (2004), Developing Global Scientists and Engineers (International Research Experiences or Students (IRES) and Doctoral Dissertation Enhancement Projects (DDEP)), Program Solicitation, Retrieved May 10, 2006 from http://www.nsf.gov.

4. Honig*, M. and Obonyo, E., The Architectural Response to Homelessness: A Viable Service and Not a Privilege, Art and Design for Social Justice, Symposium 2006 Proceedings, pp19 – 25.

5. Obonyo E.A and Omenya, A. 2006, Semantic Markup of information on Sanitation Initiatives in Informal Settlements. Joint International Conference on Computing and Decision Making in Civil and Building Engineering. Montreal, Canada: pp2791-2800. 6. Obonyo E.A and Omenya, A. 2006, Agent-based Modelling of Urban Sanitation: Informal

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