The mentoring component of Millennium Kids got a boost recently when we joined forces with Enitiate, a student organisation established to give Engineering students exposure to real world projects. Enitiate collaborate with community partners to give students at all different levels of their university studies the opportunity to work on the ideation, feasibility, and scoping stages of technical projects.
With this partnership we are targeting improving some of the infrastructure at the WeSAVE school in Dompu, Indonesia. Our first project with Enitiate, in semester one of 2024, looked at the feasibility of collecting, treating and storing rainwater at the school. The students had to understand the climate of Dompu, issues of water quality, water consumption at the school, roof catchment opportunities, and available physical and financial resources. The report they prepared provides the school with a planning framework to apply at all different stages of water management, from present and future infrastructure development and management, to water storage and use.
We were delighted when Enitiate offered us the opportunity to partner with them again in second semester. WeSAVE are extremely grateful for the input, and also for the recognition that such partnerships provide their small, rural school. We spoke with the school about their priorities, and were able to give Enitiate a few project choices. We have just had our first meeting with the project group, who this semester will be working on the potential for making the existing fish farm more efficient, and the possibility of expanding it into a more productive aquaculture system. They will look at design of biological filtration systems that can strip nutrients from the fish tanks to grow additional food.
This current project has two links to the previous semester’s report. Firstly, maintaining water quality in the fish farm currently uses a lot of water, and, as the previous report showed we don’t have a lot to spare, so any conservation is valuable. Secondly, a couple of the students from last semester have chosen to work on this project as well. This gives great continuity to the partnership between Enitiate and the school, and underlines the Enitiate vision to “provide a platform for sustainable relationships, in which students gain practical and professionally focused skills, Enitiate’s community partners further their cause, and the engineering industry connects with a driven student community”.
While the Enitiate collaboration provides us with information, rather than hard advice as may be expected by a client later in the career of the students, the reports will be very valuable resources for MK and WeSAVE for the next phase, as we seek funding and partnerships to make these projects happen on the ground.
