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INTRODUCTION
members. Today EWB-DK comprises more than 500 members with 180 of them organised
in student chapters at four of the main Danish universities: Engineering College of Aarhus,
Aalborg University, University of Southern Denmark and Technical University of Denmark.
The purpose of the student chapters at the universities is to let the students contribute to
the projects with their engineering skills, as well as to develop their competences by let-
ting them identify and solve humanitarian problems of technical character.
This means that EWB-DK has three main focus areas:
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� Emergency relief
� Development projects
� Student chapters
The Danish branch of EWB operates in close cooperation with most other Danish relief
organisations, e.g. Danish Red Cross and Danish Refugee Council, as well as universities
and private companies. Internationally EWB-DK collaborates with national branches of
EWB in Sierra Leone, India, Israel and Palestine at both a practical and an academic level.
1.2 Past projects
Recent examples of EWB-DK collaboration projects include:
� Re-housing 500 families in Haiti after the earthquake
� Establishing a school in Sierra Leone for children of war amputees
� Providing an engineer as team leader and site planner during the building of tem-
porary refugee camps in Southern Sudan
� Establishing solar and wind power supplies on the West Bank in Palestine
The latter example is a hybrid energy project where students from Aalborg University and
Engineering College of Aarhus collaborated with EWB-DK, the Israeli and Palestinian
branches of EWB, and the organisation COMET-ME (Community, Energy and Technology in
the Middle East). COMET-ME is a joint venture of Israeli and Palestinian communities.
Their mission is to facilitate social and economic empowerment in the most marginalised
and poorest communities in the occupied Palestinian territories. This is mainly done by
providing off-grid energy services in an environmentally and socially sustainable way.
The project was based in the beleaguered Palestinian community of Hareibat a Nabi, lo-
cated close to the Israeli border. The community’s roughly 60 permanent inhabitants make
their living by very traditional and non-mechanised agriculture and by herding goats and
sheep. Since its location is close to the border and due to the conflict between Palestine
and Israel, there are constant visits from the Israeli occupation administration to make
sure that nothing new is built. Moreover there is a constant presence of the Israeli army to
prevent Palestinian day-workers without a permit from crossing the border to Israel.