The development projects of twenty one teams of young engineers have won Mondialogo Engineering Awards worth a total of !300,000. The awards were presented in Berlin on 30 May by the two partners in the initiative, DaimlerChrysler and UNESCO.

Over the past year, young engineers from developed
and developing countries have been working together on project proposals addressing the UN Millennium Development Goals, particularly those of eradicating extreme poverty and promoting environmentally sustainable development.

The award money of €14,000 per team will help the winning teams to realize their projects. In the category of emergency and disaster response and reconstruction, for example, the winning team of engineering students from Ryerston University in Canada and the American University of Beirut in Lebanon will be deploying an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) they have designed for remote-controlled landmine detection. The UAV is due to go to Afghanistan, Cambodia and Lebanon. There are an estimated 110 million functional landmines around the world; these can cost as little as US$3 a piece to manufacture but as much as US$1000 a piece to detect and disarm, at great risk to the demining personnel. The automated UAV is able to move and hover over a minefield. It will clear urban and rural centres of landmines, thereby curbing the number of landmine-related fatalities and injuries and helping countries return to economic stability in the process by reclaiming previously unsafe farmlands and clearing roads. The easy-to-use UAV will also diminish the risk to demining personnel, speed up the demining process and reduce its cost.

Winning designs in other categories include the provision of solar power to health centres in rural areas of Mali by a Germano-Malian team (see photos); a project involving engineers from Myanmar and Singapore to develop a sustainable centralized sanitation system for new townships around Yangon in Myanmar; a plastic waste management system designed by a British-Kenyan team to deal with the substantial quantities of plastic bags affecting the Pumwani environment in Kenya, with the parallel goal of contributing to economic development through product sale; an Americano-Indian project to provide arsenic-free water to remote villages in West Bengal in India; and the treatment and recovery of waste whey in the Palestinian dairy industry, designed by a Canadian-Palestinian team.

This first edition of the Mondialogo Engineering Awards originally involved 412 teams of 1700 young engineers and students from 79 countries, whose projects were examined by an international jury.

For details: www.unesco.org/science/bes; www.mondialogo.org/