Let's do it! Make poverty a history!

It is after a month coming back from Korea, a lot has been done to pass down my mission to convince my university. It is today not an easy path as a student in Malaysia who had a wild vision of making academic staffs understand engineering education should head to a path to eradicate poverty.

The question is: Is that really necessary to transform local engineering education to deliver human capital in eradicating poverty? Transforming might not be possible as the education has already been in this manner decades ago. But it might be wise for academicians to realize that, life quality of the entire world has to be lifted in order for a higher level of awareness in environmental sustainability can be achieved.

There was once I listen to a keynote speech in Sweden, the speaker mentioned: " You can't stop Indonesians from burning forests."(not to discriminate Indonesians) He tried to address the bigger problem we are facing here today is the problem arises from inferior life quality in developing nations as compared to developed nations. The effort done to preserve the environment is being overcomed by the actions that deteriorates our environmental quality!

Academicians and students in developing nations, think: Is it really necessary to conduct researches on environmental preservation? Should we take a step back, and think how to improve life quality of the extreme paupers? Improved life quality by fulfilling the basic needs such as clean water and electricity enables economic development, which then leads to affordability of basic education, thus improved life quality at a higher level. With sufficient spending power, one can certainly afford clean energy and the awareness can be built from young through education!

We, who desired to develop the bottom billion are inspired not only to solve problems in the near decade, we too sought to preserve the environment but in a very long run and a bigger scale. We do not provide technologies to preserve the environment, but we create people who will walk together with you to preserve the environment in the future few decades.