Design Outreach, a cooperating ministry in the Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches, was featured this week in the Lantern, the student newspaper of The Ohio State University, where Design Outreach co-founder, Greg Bixler, is a faculty member. A portion of the story appears below. Click here for the complete article.
LifePump works to provide water to those in poverty
For years, Vickness Nyirede spent 12 hours a day walking from her village in rural Malawi to a well, where she collected rust-colored water for her family.
Around the world, there are more than 783 million people like Nyirede, who don’t have access to clean drinking water, according to a report by the United Nations.
Design Outreach, a nonprofit humanitarian engineering organization founded by Ohio State professor Greg Bixler, has addressed this problem by creating LifePump, a water pump that can provide clean drinking water to poverty-stricken villages around the world.
“Some problems in the world are not solvable, but some problems are very solvable,” said Bixler, a lecturer with the Department of Engineering Education. “And I think access to safe water that’s reliable — that’s a solvable problem. It doesn’t have to be a struggle for hundreds of millions of people.”
Bixler said he was inspired to create Design Outreach 10 years ago after traveling to Kyrgyzstan on a mission trip.
“I saw the need — the problems with poverty — people who were really suffering and who didn’t have the basics that they needed,” Bixler said. “But I also saw people who used really creative solutions to solve their problems, and I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be neat if we could come alongside those creative people, but as engineers and maybe solve problems in other areas too?’”
Click here for the complete article.