ETH4D to be launched
ETH4D is an ETH-wide initiative to foster innovative technologies that effectively address challenges and needs of low-income communities. It will be launched in February 2019
Technological innovations offer great potential for poverty reduction. However, developing effective solutions to poverty need to combine technological innovation with a profound understanding of people’s behaviour and their social and economic environments. Therefore, ETH4D supports collaborative teaching and research, which combines the knowledge and skills of engineering, the natural sciences and the social sciences and promotes the collaboration between research and practice.
Within the coming years ETH4D plans to establish a professorship to push the frontiers of Development Engineering research, a platform to bring together science and society to ensure that research and education is driven by real-world challenges of people in low-income countries, and Engineering for Development courses in Switzerland and sub-Saharan Africa to educate the future leaders of sustainable development.