I met Elizabeth and John when I stayed in their village, Gbaln, in Ghana’s Northern Region. I stayed in Elizabeth’s home and she became my companion for four days, translating much of my experience because my Lingpapa was limited to greetings.
At 18, Elizabeth is looking forward to completing high school and finding a job so that when she decides to marry and have children she will be able to contribute financially to supporting them. I hope there will be jobs available to her.
John is an entrepreneur of sorts, only he isn’t selling anything. He’s one of those people who has a lot of ideas, and is always keen to share them with everyone, especially new people to the village. But John doesn’t just have ideas, he also tests them out and implements them where possible, sharing his experiences with the community around him. Because of John’s education and past career in the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, he is now the community liaison with local government, a job that requires persistence and initiative.
I write this to share some of the experiences that have led me to pursue a (perhaps) less traditional career path. I want to help change the face of the engineering profession and careers within the public service by becoming a “global engineer” and part of a more innovative public service. I’ve adopted the term global engineer because it offers the most room within which to define ways that I can go beyond education and awareness of global issues to discover how to act on ideas or implement approaches that I learn about.
I have two passions driving me in my career development. The first is sustainable development in the whole social, environmental and economic sense of the term. The second I call “change,” meaning the practical application of development models, with attention to the roles of technology and innovation within a local context.
I believe the most effective way of stimulating change in organizations, and even countries, is to build on opportunities for change that we find within individuals. By starting with a focus on individuals, opportunities become apparent that start to erode what often seem like impenetrable and intangible systems beyond the influence of a few well-meaning and coordinated efforts.
While studying aerospace engineering, an applied science that uses technology to solve societal problems, at Carleton University, I helped found the university chapter of Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB). Through it I began to learn about the role of technology in development – particularly in regions of poverty.
I got my first real work experience in energy research and development for Natural Resources Canada. Doing computational fluid dynamics modelling of combustion for over two years, I gained a working knowledge of the role of science and technology in solving problems.
I learned that even within a highly scientific and technological environment, there are things that science strictly can and can’t tell you, and things that technology strictly can and can’t do for you. Science and technology can give you facts in response to the question you’ve asked, but they can’t promise you truth. The devil is in the assumptions, and it is more important to get the question right than it is to receive the answer.
Steady state analysis, or anecdotal case studies of an existing situation, can miss a lot of critical information that would be captured in a transient analysis, or observations of situations over time.
Government has a unique role in the planning and development of society, one that changes over time and varies from location to location, and sector to sector. On the one hand, it has to play an unbiased enabler; on the other hand, it is asked to demonstrate leadership.
I then volunteered for a year with EWB, working to develop their programs in Africa. I say develop and not deliver because, as I soon learned, EWB’s programs are dynamic and depend on a rigorous method of creating hypotheses, testing them and challenging assumptions. So while I was working directly with my partner organization, I wasn’t there just to deliver a curriculum or manage a project – I was there so that we could create something together.
I was sent to Ghana for 13 months to work with the local government in the north on EWB’s Governance & Rural Infrastructure program. I worked with Habib, a public servant working at the Regional Planning & Coordinating Unit whose role was to support the district officers in their development planning and implementation of programs. Like all officers in the regional and district government, Habib found himself juggling the demands of multiple projects from multiple bosses.
As I was working alongside him I realized that his reality was off the radar of international programs. It is an oversight that could be explained because the local government officer is not usually the intended beneficiary of an aid program. Only once the subject of a sustainable change resulting from a program arises does the case of local government capacity start to become central to the success of a program.
What does this mean to my job as a Canadian public servant in clean energy R&D? When the topic of sustainability comes up in development conversations, it is soon followed by the term “local ownership,” an essential ingredient for continual development. Ghanaians must own development initiatives, rather than just receive or host them, to ensure a measure of lasting change.
Yet just as essential, I learned that if I wanted more than a well executed and maintained project, if I wanted something transformative and lasting, I needed to have ownership over the initiative as well. Once I acknowledged that I had as much to gain or lose as they did in the success of a program, I adopted a role that put me in a better position to make the tough decisions and adopt the best approaches to its design and implementation. It was about empowering myself to contribute more decisively to solving a problem that previously had been more about them than me.
This is a tall order for those who have dedicated their career to development, be it international, technological, human, institutional or other. It’s about becoming a more effective person on a number of levels so as to meet the complex challenges and changes that affect all of us. Climate change, peace and security, poverty, environmental degradation, while felt more directly by so many others in far more vulnerable situations than my own, are my problems as well. I need to own them with all of the passion and desperation that Habib, Elizabeth and John feel.
I want to build a cross-disciplinary career with more than a general working knowledge in a few areas. I believe all levels of government have a critical role to play in change and sustainable development. I also believe that efforts are currently hindered by unstated assumptions, a misunderstanding of the role of technology, and the ambiguity of both policymaking and planning for change. I hope to shape a career that champions the principles of learning in policymaking and program design by straddling both worlds. To do this I need to understand change, and be a practitioner of it.
Looking ahead, my progression doesn’t appear simple, and I fully expect to spend my career trying to figure it out. But I think it’s possible, and worth trying. For even if I never achieve it, I have the comfort of knowing that I’m one of many who are becoming global engineers, and part of the next generation of innovative public servants.
Jennifer Hiscock is a Science & Technology Advisor for the Innovation & Energy Technology Sector at Natural Resources Canada. She spent 13 months working with local government in Ghana’s Northern Region throug
