Finalist

Community Engagement Initiative of the Year Award

IngénieuxSud - a service learning course

Finalist of the Community Engagement Initiative of the Year Award

Université catholique de Louvain - Belgium

"Northern-Southern students acting together for a sustainable and fair world."


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#UCLouvain
(Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain))
#LouvainCoopération
(Louvain Coopération: the NGO of UCLouvain)
#FondationLouvain
(The foundation which financially supports the IngénieuxSud projects thanks to sponsoring of companies and private patrons.)

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Summary

The access to water and food, health care, sustainable energy, education, efficient communication, etc. is still a major issue for more than half of the world population in the 21st century. The academic education programs in science and technology in our universities prepare the young generation of scientists mainly to outperform in their own discipline for better serving the techno-liberal society in which they live. For a growing number of students, their academic learning lacks meaning. University must be engaged with his community to build up new paradigms. IngénieuxSud is a Service-Learning course where the students from Belgium and Southern countries work together to bring appropriate and sustainable solutions to concrete issues formulated by vulnerable economic and social actors, mainly located in sub-Saharan Africa, South America and East Asia. The intense collaboration between Northern and Southern students forming multidisciplinary and multicultural academic groups is quite unique in a Service-Learning program. The students do not work for but with all the stakeholders, from the design of a solution to its implementation in the field. IngénieuxSud contributes to training Belgian and Southern students to become enlightened professionals aware of current global challenges and to provide solutions that go beyond technical efficiency and economic profitability while serving vulnerable populations. This community engagement course brings improved living conditions to people in need, holistic view and critical mind to scientists, confidence and self-esteem to all the parties, new perspectives for the North-South collaboration in order to tackle global challenges today and tomorrow.

Key People


Prof. Jean-Pierre Raskin
Professor
Louvain School of Engineering (EPL) / Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics (ICTEAM),  Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain)



Mrs. Stéphanie Merle
Expert in Global Citizenship Learning
Research and Development Department,  NGO Louvain Coopération


Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the following bodies who have been supporting the initiative since the beginning: (1) the UCLouvain’s authorities for the freedom given to the teaching teams in the establishment and evolvement of the IngénieuxSud course, (2) the Foundation Louvain and the Directorate-General for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (DGD-Belgium) for the financing support, (3) all the professors and scientists of Southern Universities for their commitment and more particularly Professor Haddy Mbuyi Katshiatshia of the University of Kinshasa with whom several parts of the course have been written down, (4) all the scientists, practitioners, field experts who guide the students during their project, (5) all the companies, NGOs, associations, cooperatives which host the students during their internship.

Images

IMPACT STORY

Impacting lifes

IngénieuxSud invites everyone to be engaged within his/her community to make a difference. Among more than 1,000 students who participated to IngénieuxSud, Grégoire was in the third bachelor of the Engineering School of Louvain at UCLouvain in 2016, and joined Noa, Diane, and Danaé, three students in bioengineering at UCLouvain, and Gaudens, Elsa and Andil, three students in engineering at the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin, to work together on the transformation process of the cassava. The project was defined with 15 cooperatives located in the Mono region in Benin. During a full academic year, all the students interacted remotely with the responsible people of the cooperatives, academics, scientists, and field experts to imagine together solutions. In Summer 2016, all the stakeholders met in Mono region to implement the appropriate co-constructed technical solution. The outcomes were a drastic reduction of the hardship of work for more than 170 workers by improving the tools to peel the cassava and the valorisation of the dried peelings to food supplement for small rodents. Rich of that experience, Grégoire decided to engage himself in several meaningful concrete projects where he could apply a holistic approach in science. He started a PhD thesis in 2018 on the development of affordable water quality sensors for vulnerable population. In 2020, with several researchers he put in place a doctoral school on sustainable Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and also developed an open source respirator for the South (Breath4Life) during the Covid pandemic. Grégoire became an engaged engineer!

LEARNINGS

Lessons learned

- In a Service-Learning initiative, the quality of the partnership is key. To establish a well-balanced and efficient partnership, each partner must express their own expectations and what it can bring to the consortium, and the partners must establish all together common objectives. This step takes time but it is crucial. The position of each stakeholder might evolve during the collaboration and thus those questions must be discussed throughout the whole duration of the project.
- The beneficiaries are not passive people of the community waiting for solutions coming from scientists. They are active partners and they must be strongly involved at each step of the project.
- It is through a concrete life experience that students develop critical thinking attitude and long-term engagement with their community.
- Being involved in a concrete project with real beneficiaries the students realize that the technologies are not neutral and they must adopt a holistic approach going beyond their disciplinary expertise to come up with sustainable and fair solutions.
- The teaching staff is continuously questioning the didactic devices of IngénieuxSud with the help of critical and decolonial pedagogies in order to observe what they convey in terms of representations, because they are never neutral, they can combat the structural unbalanced relationships between Northern-Southern countries but also unfortunately reinforce them.
- The imaginary of neutral knowledge to be transmitted and of a civilizing mission of the Northern countries reinforce the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of building a balanced global partnership.

FUTURE PLANS

What's coming?

UCLouvain has very recently decided to structure, reinforce and expand the initiative of IngénieuxSud in launching a Chair in Ethical Service-Learning. Today, UCLouvain’s authorities consider the development of the Service-Learning in the different students' programs as a priority. They are convinced in the positive impact of such a pedagogical device to promote the development of young generations to be citizens of the world and actors in the development of a more sustainable and fair world. In Summer 2023, several associations will welcome students from UCLouvain and Southern universities in Belgium for the implementation of IngénieuxSud projects. The movement of Southern students to Belgium will reinforce the equity of North-South exchanges. Southern students will bring a fresh perspective on issues existing in Belgian organizations. Beside the evolution of IngénieuxSud, UCLouvain encourages the development of Service-Learning initiatives in the other sectors of the university. We can cite the Rosa Parks Legal Clinic for human rights for the Human Sciences Sector and the Patient behaviours and skills for health program for the Health Sciences Sector. The professors of those different initiatives met in 2020 and realized that they shared a common vision for the teaching experiences to be offered to students and also the same limitations and difficulties in implementing Service-Learning activities. In the framework of the Chair in Ethical Service-Learning, they will promote the exchange of good practices, strengthen them pedagogically in financing research proposals, evaluate and make those teaching devices visible to the academic community.


KEY STATISTICS

1070

Number of Northern and Southern students who have participated to IngénieuxSud project-course since 2012

22

Involved countries: Belgium and countries in sub-Saharan Africa, South America and East Asia

33

Involved universities: UCLouvain and universities in sub-Saharan Africa, South America and East Asia

135

Realized projects with associations, cooperatives, NGOs, or companies

100,000+

Beneficiaries (inhabitants in a Southern country) of the provided services by the groups of students

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