Ole Miss engineering students change lives in Togo, Africa

University of Mississippi engineering students and faculty traveled to the remote village of Lome in Togo Africa to help improve the lifestyle of the local natives.

“The trip to Lome was a fantastic experience…” said UM chapters of Engineers Without Borders president, Mark Barger.

            The UM chapter of the Engineers Without Borders was established approximately three years ago. Their purpose is to partner with suffering communities in hope of improving their lifestyle through environmentally sound and economically sustainable engineering projects, while developing the skills of engineering students at the university.

“EWB is a fantastic group of people with brilliant ideas focused on a common humanitarian/infrastructure project,” said Barger.

EWB travels to different areas building greenhouse crops, schools, treated potable water, fish and poultry management systems, irrigation systems, wastewater systems, and solid-waste systems to communities in need of lifestyle improvement.

Baptist minister Kokou Loko of Togo, had reached out to EWB and expressed the need of help for his people. Marni Kendricks, the EWB faculty adviser, agreed to help.

“The purpose of this trip is to conduct an official community needs assessment in accordance with the EWB-USA model of exploration and evaluation,” said Kendricks.

The students and faculty of EWB traveled to Togo, Africa to begin making plans for the people of Togo.

“We hope to be able to accomplish a few significant things, i.e., determine what the villagers think are their greatest needs that can be solved by EWB, forge acceptable partnership arrangements with the village leaders and create a proposed 5-10 year plan for phased-in infrastructure improvements for the village,” said Kendricks.

The agreement with communities and EWB is as follows; EWB will fund 90% of expenses, however, the community or village will have to fund the remaining 10%. This raised many problems seeing that the average family in Togo only makes between $40 and $70 a month. 

EWB has recently agreed to help Hedome Village, a small village in Togo, Africa that is in need of a school.

“It turned out that the community which met all of EWB- USA's partnering requirements, as well as, won our hearts have a most pressing need for a school,” said senior geological engineer major and EWB vice president, Elsie Okoye.

EWB has made plans to go back to Togo to start building the school, as well as, other needed systems in August.

“If all goes well we will have a small travel team go back to Togo in August, only this time to actually build the school we have been working so hard on,” said EWB member, Maddie Costelli.