What Is Global Engineering?

As engineers we should be concerned with the unequal and unjust distribution of access to basic services, such as water, sanitation, energy, food, transportation, and shelter, and as engineers we should place an em-phasis on identifying the drivers, determinants, and solutions to in-creasing equitable access to reliable services. Global Engineering en-visions a world where everyone has safe water, sanitation, energy, food, shelter, and infrastructure, and can live in health, dignity, and prosperity.

There are abundant reasons to be optimistic about global development, public health and poverty reduction. The billions of people who have been vaccinated, the increasing number of people entering the middle class, and the myriad accomplishments cited in reports on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable De-velopment Goals (SDGs) all testify to the positive impact of current development policies and practice on economic growth, life expec-tancy, and overall prosperity (Rosling, Rosling and Rönnlund, 2018).

Global progress has been unambiguously impressive. Over the past 200 years, nearly every country and region in the world has progressed from poverty and low life expectancy to better financial and health outcomes (Figure 1). Likewise, global mortality among children five years old and younger (an important indicator of overall national public health) has shown dramatic declines for all major causes, including malaria, HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases, neonatal compli-cations, and birth defects (Figure 2). These clear trends can be inter-preted optimistically as inevitable global progress.

Yet today, over half the world’s population still lives on less than $5.50 a day (The World Bank, 2018). The burden of disease in low-income countries is overwhelmingly attributable to environmental health issues including air quality and quality, sanitation, and disease vectors includ-ing malaria-carrying mosquitos (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2019). While the fraction of the world’s population living in absolute poverty has decreased over the past 50 years, the absolute number of people in poverty – about 1 billion – has not changed over the last 30 years. The World Bank projects that, by 2030, about 500 million people will live in extreme poverty, with the majority living in sub-Saharan Africa.

The role of the engineer in addressing today’s global poverty chal-lenges must be elevated. While village-scale interventions may have a positive impact on a community, product design may address some consumer demands, and large-scale infrastructure can in the short-term fill gaps in basic services, the structural constraints that perpetu-ate poverty require structural solutions.

It is challenging to strike a balance between forgiving optimism and paralyzing pessimism when examining the spectrum and arc of global development. As engineers, we want to be able to design and imple-ment durable solutions. However, we need to broaden our perspective to include solutions to underlying structural problems.

The field of Global Engineering can contribute to addressing these structural issues, by developing and validating methods, tools, and standards that are broadly leveraged to increase poverty reduction. Technology development and demonstration, data collection, and im-pact evaluation can all contribute to evidence-based influence on pol-icies and practice. Remote-sensing technologies are informing con-versations about the impacts of global warming; data collection and analysis technologies support impact evaluations by generating robust findings on the effectiveness of interventions; systems engineering is expanding the engineer’s lens to more broadly consider institutions, governance, and financial planning in basic service delivery; and en-gineering education is embracing history, public health, and policy.