‘Where There Is No Engineer’ 2024 Trip to India
On the 28th of September 2024, Shannen, George and Christopher travelled to Tamil Nadu, India, to implement their WTINE winner project, the Nutricure, with the support of our development partner, FIN India Trust. They arrived in Chennai and spent one day discovering the city before travelling to Kameswaram, the village where FIN is based.
On the first day in the village, the team conducted a great workshop with farmers where they explained their project, followed by a group discussion. An amazing crowd attended, and they were so interested in the project they requested different systems to pilot test them. The team also introduced their project at a local recycling centre and college and to policymakers. Thanks to the insights from people in the village, they developed different systems from their initial prototype and implemented them on roofs, ponds, and even on the ground at the FIN office. They also identified a community necessity their project could tackle – the need to grow crops during monsoon season. Currently, farmers in the village can only grow rice during the rainy season, as the ground floods and plants rot. The team is, therefore, aiming for the Nutricure system to be a solution for farmers and households to grow a diverse range of crops during the monsoon. Due to incredible interest in the project, the team worked really hard during the week they spent in Kameswaram and implemented the systems in 13 different sites instead of 3 sites, as was planned in the beginning. They also had the opportunity to attend the inauguration of three Ecosan toilets that FIN had recently built in its office and two households, continuing its work towards the improvement of WASH infrastructure in Kameswaram.
The project has now moved to the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) phase, and the team is in direct contact with Nutricure users, receiving updates from all the implemented systems. During the next weeks, the team will gather all necessary data and decide on the next steps of the project. EWB will also support the team in developing the project’s next phases.
EWB would like to thank our partner FIN for all their support throughout the project implementation and for being amazing hosts in Kameswaram.
If you want to know more about this project, the WTINE program or the work we do at EWB Ireland, you can contact us at info@ewb-ireland.org or via our social media channels.
