THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE ENGINEER IN THE HUMANITARIAN SECTOR
27th May 2026
Image Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, CA, USA
The Speaker
Francesca (Ces) O'Hanlon is a humanitarian Water and Sanitation Engineer and an alumna of the University of Cambridge Centre for Sustainable Development. She is well known for her field work with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Engineers Without Borders UK.
Introductory Presentation
Ces has extensive experience in low-income countries in Africa. Her experience working with Médecins Sans Frontières in South Sudan and the Central African Republic has given her exceptional insight into the role of engineers in extreme circumstances. In her introduction, Ces focused on her partnership with a South Sudanese water and sanitation counterpart, what they each brought to the table, and why both skill sets and experiences were needed to improve access to safe water and sanitation in the communities and refugee camps where they were operating. For example, Ces’s counterpart knew how to mix cement but did not possess much theoretical knowledge.
Ces reflected on how the role of the engineer in the humanitarian sector is changing. Historically, the role was to repair damaged infrastructure systems following disaster. We now know that, to have the greatest impact on human survival and quality of life, the international engineer should build local capacity so that infrastructure systems are resilient to a range of shocks and stresses.
Professional engineers have been trained to think about how to engineer for the long term and have a good theoretical understanding of engineering. We, in the developed world, are not living in a constant state of disaster and have the luxury of planning and designing in times of peace and prosperity. This skill set and experience are desperately needed in countries that are in constant emergency-mode. For British engineers to be still relevant in disaster settings today, the ability to work with, and train local tradesmen and women and engineers is as important as technical know-how.
Discussion
Question 1: “Why do you believe it will be useful to continue to deploy international engineers to disaster zones? How will they be useful?”
The view was that international engineers could act as neutral and independent contributors, acting as partners to humanitarian organisations. This would require understanding of the broader humanitarian problems, which might be different now to the past. To be useful, engineers need experience of what works in practice and what patterns of issues might exist in disaster zones. These could include commercial factors, social factors as well as physical engineering challenges.
The modern humanitarian engineer has had to become something subtler, and perhaps more difficult: less builder and more translator, less hero and more partner. That is why international engineers should still deploy to disaster zones. Not because they possess superiority of knowledge, but because they bring distance, comparative experience, and the ability to see patterns across crises.
In reality, humanitarian engineering succeeds only when two forms of knowledge meet: systems and societal needs bringing both breadth and depth.
Question 2: “If international humanitarian engineers are shifting from ‘hands-on rebuilding of infrastructure in the wake of disasters to ‘capacity building and overseeing systems designed for long-term resilience', how should we train them differently in the UK now that the emphasis is on leaving capacity behind, not just delivering projects?”
Humanitarian engineering requires skills in social science, including empathy, communication and understanding, as well as technical engineering. It needs engineers with some deep experience as well as broader skills – so-called ‘T-Shaped’ engineers (with deep experience in several areas, not just one). Effort is needed to understand the wider environment and possible unintended consequences of project delivery in that context.
Some engineers pursue humanitarian engineering as a career and they can learn from case to case, bringing that experience to new situations. Their feedback and case experience might help to improve the education of engineers who want to pursue the humanitarian route.
A key concern is how to appropriately manage risk in different contexts and how to be resourceful in constrained situations.
We should leverage technology to approach solutions in different ways to find the fastest way to recover. We need to transition from reconstruction to resilience, We still train engineers for certainty: stable budgets, fixed specifications, reliable institutions and predictable environments. Humanitarian contexts offer none of those comforts. Engineers working in fragile states now need to be part diplomat, part teacher, part negotiator and part systems thinker.
We should train them to communicate across languages and cultures, to manage community relationships, and to understand governance as thoroughly as geotechnics. Young engineers should learn how to design for scarcity: intermittent power, limited maintenance capacity, disrupted supply chains and political instability. They should spend less time imagining ideal conditions and more time wrestling with compromised realities.
The future humanitarian engineer may not be the person who just builds the bridge, it may be the person who helps a local team learn how to inspect it, finance it, repair it, argue for it politically, and redesign it after the next flood.
They should realise that different cultures respond in different ways, they need to understand what outcomes they are seeking and how to make use of every resource available. We need to train the engineers for their long-term career and make them understand the wider context.
Our education needs to focus on multi-disciplinary thinking where we focus on outcomes not outputs and use critical thinking to truly understand what the problem is?
And that is not the diminishing of the profession, it is its evolution.
Speaker's Response
Ces thanked the members of the Society for their inputs on what, for many, is an alien topic. The medium-term aim is move from ‘hero’ to ‘partner’. But we should note that engineers who do help in humanitarian circumstances, irrespective of their exact role, will gain enormous learning.