Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering (DHE) is an entirely student-run club at Dartmouth focused on global community development in health and sustainability. My focus within DHE was the Bioenergy project, which worked on creating charcoal briquettes from agricultural waste as an alternative cooking fuel. The ultimate aims of the project were reduce lung disease caused by inhaling particulates in smoke, and deforestation by replacing wood as a cook fuel. During my involvement I served as a trip leader and a project leader.
Implementation Trip Leader, Fall 2013 and Winter 2014 (Team of Four)
Role: Trip leader for a five-week implementation trip to Arusha, Tanzania (documented on the trip blog).
This included coordinating the preparation for the trip during the preceding term (such as logistical and technical planning and gaining approval from the institutional review board and a panel of Thayer deans and faculty), organizing work with four NGOs in Tanzania, and documenting the trip upon returning to campus.
Results:
The trip built upon the work of previous teams to assess the efficacy of briquetting within the communities and connect the communities together to support each other in the future. The team conducted user research to determine the impact of previous DHE trips, discovering that while Arusha was originally selected for its access to translators and relative ease of travel, briquetting would work better in rural areas closer to agricultural waste streams. We helped one women’s group to begin bringing their briquettes to a market, to create a small business.
Download Trip Report
Project Leader, Spring 2014-Fall 2014
I served as co-leader and leader for the Bioenergy project directly following the implementation trip. During this period I coordinated the final travel team in Tanzania, closing out a grant from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, brought a local biochar expert to work with DHE on Dartmouth’s Organic Farm, and facilitated sending a project assessment team to Jinotega, Nicaragua.