Global Humanitarian Engineering Solutions: A Partnership Between Mercer University and the United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot

摘要

Mercer University's Engineering for Development (E4D) program prepares students to become leaders in implementing sustainable solutions for people and the environment, with an emphasis on improving the lives of under-served populations. The United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot (UNHRD), an entity of the World Food Programme (WFP), is responsible primarily for procurement, prepositioning, and transport of relief non-food items on behalf of the international humanitarian community, for over eighty global organizations. Since early-2015, Mercer's E4D program has been a partner with UNHRD LAB, the research and development lab that focuses on providing better solutions to UNHRD and its partners, specifically to improve logistics support equipment and provide solutions for reducing waste from relief item packaging. This paper describes: (1) background on UNHRD and Mercer's E4D program, (2) the initiation and development of the Mercer-UNHRD partnership, (3) key ways in which the partnership is advancing interests both for Mercer's engineering students and UNHRD, including through student research and design projects, (4) how UNHRD-Mercer research topics are being used to pique students' interest while they learn fundamental engineering concepts, and (5) future plans to grow the partnership.