Programs : Brochure

Change lives this summer with your creative solutions to real problems for real people in Kenya! This program is designed for students who have an interest in innovative design engineering geared toward developing populations. Using the Turkana Basin Institute as the base for their field work, students will work in interdisciplinary teams to have a positive global and local impact through relevant fieldwork and case studies. 

Each course's learning objectives are posed to help engineers better understand the population they are serving. This field course at Turkana Basin would expose students to apply the design thinking and mission-centric Lean LaunchPad methodology for discovering both the technical problems and the customers for the local community at the Turkana Basin. The students will identify such problems in the proper socio-economic and cultural context by deep observation and engagement with the local community by taking an empathy-oriented approach. 

The coursework introduces students to the main principles of engineering and discusses the details of providing a standard of living that is adequate for human settlement in developing countries. The discussion will be based on the social, geo-political, and infrastructural elements in Ileret, Kenya. Students will be exposed to a comparison between the resources available in developed countries against those available in rural areas and/or areas of limited resources.