2023 Institute Scholarship Fund

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A nonprofit fundraiser supporting

Engineering World Health

100% of your gift will support volunteer engineers traveling to Guatemala, Uganda and Nepal in 2023!

$455

raised by 6 people

$5,000 goal

Maximize your Impact with 

In celebration of our our long-awaited return to this critical work, 100% of your year-end gift to EWH will go to our 2023 scholarship fund and directly support the participation of young engineers on our Institute programs.

Thanks to our friends at Vontier, the first $2,500 raised will be met with a generous 1:1 match! 

If you give $100, Vontier will match your contribution with another $100, meaning your impact will be doubled. 

Want your gift to go even further? Check to see if your employer matches donations to nonprofit organizations!


Saving Equipment is Saving Lives

After a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we're thrilled to be back on the ground working with talented young engineers while providing critical services to hospitals in need. 

In 2022, 68 volunteers in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Nepal repaired 651 pieces of equipment in 29 EWH partner hospitals. Their service and repairs are worth an estimated $1.3 million invested in improving healthcare delivery in vulnerable communities.



Many hospitals around the world rely on donated medical equipment to treat patients. Unfortunately, much of this potentially life-saving equipment arrives unusable in the local environment, and over time, nearly all of it falls out of service.

When medical equipment breaks down in low-resource countries, it often stays broken. There are usually few supply chains to get replacement parts, and local technical expertise is sparse. Hospitals face large challenges accessing skilled technicians who can install, repair, and maintain this critical equipment. Infant incubators, oxygen concentrators, and patient monitors lay abandoned in equipment "graveyards."

EWH Summer Institutes provide intensive hands-on training to university students and young professionals in STEM fields and then place them in hospitals in low-resource areas of Central America, Southeast Asia, and East and West Africa to serve as volunteer biomedical equipment technicians.

Participants collaborate with local hospital staff to repair medical equipment and improve the facilities’ overall healthcare technology situation, improving their ability to provide quality care to patients in need.

In addition to providing a tangible benefit to hospitals in need, EWH Summer Institutes engage students and young engineers in an immersive learning experience unlike any other. 

Volunteers often find that they are challenged in unexpected ways; working with few resources at their disposal forces them to be creative and truly think outside the box to solve pressing real-word problems. This process helps hone critical skills that will ultimately make them better engineers while exposing them to the realities of low-resource healthcare that many providers around the world face every day.

EWH volunteers often find themselves responding to urgent situations. Alex, a recent grad from the University of Portland, scrubbed into a surgery room to repair a surgery table during our 2022 Institute in the Dominican Republic; “…they needed [the table] in the next 10 minutes or so, so we had to go quickly and make it operational,” he said. Martin, a junior, who described the experience as “life-changing,” told us that his favorite fix was replacing surgical lights during an active surgery. “It was one of the key moments that made me rethink my career path."

We believe that facilitating these experiences will inspire more young engineers to consider biomedical engineering and global health as viable career paths, and encourage the next generation of engineers to adopt a different mindset when it comes to engineering design - one that is mindful of challenges posed in low-resource settings and strives for greater accessibility - ultimately making healthcare better for all.

Thanks to support from people like you who believe in our mission, EWH is able to provide financial assistance the the majority of students who choose to spend their Summer in service with us.

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