With their focus on Humanitarian Engineering, ENHANCE partners at the University of Dhaka have met the challenges posed by the 2020 global pandemic with innovation, compassion and action. In February 2019, DU hosted a two day long Practice-dialogue Workshop during which 75 participants, including 12 foreign delegates identified the major humanitarian engineering challenges to Bangladesh as follows: climate change, environmental pollution, public health, natural disaster, waste management and food safety. A year on from that, we were facing the outbreak of COVID-19 – which has created and exacerbated humanitarian challenges worldwide.

We are pleased to release the agenda for the upcoming 1st International Symposium on Humanitarian Engineering Challenges and Approaches. The Symposium is hosted by the University of West Attica with support from project ENHANCE. It comprises four sessions across two days on the 18th and 19th of May 2021.

Students from UGM, ITB and UB participated in an online summer school, discussing local community needs and issues, and developing innovative responses. Despite the pandemic restricting their access to fieldwork and face to face learning, the students were able to engage with existing humanitarian challenges and work together to produce impressive outputs. Collaboration between the three universities through the ENHANCE project has renewed their collective focus on local humanitarian challenges and enabled students and staff to work and learn together.