Initial content of, and contributions to this website illustrate the nature of the coverage we intend to achieve.  Feel free to browse and make suggestions for website improvements by emailing [email protected]

Welcome to the Humanitarian Engineering Community of Practice

The Humanitarian Engineering Community of Practice (HECoP) will help explain the essence and boundaries of Humanitarian Engineering by capturing and updating the concepts, skills and practices that are generally accepted and known within the field. Membership of this online community is free and open to the public. If you haven't already joined, and would like to do so, click "sign up" at the top of this page.

Our intent is to:

“Foster the application of professional engineering discipline to the leadership, management, design and delivery of humanitarian undertakings”.

Of course, all engineering should be humanitarian ("to promote human welfare"). Specifically, Humanitarian Engineering is understood to be the application of an engineering discipline to a specific humanitarian response across the breath of contexts and locations, from disaster response through to community and technology development, both internationally and domestically (Smith et al 2019).  Humanitarian Engineering specifically engages disadvantaged, marginalised or vulnerable communities by actively addressing and prioritising in focussed engineering practice in those communities.  It mobilises the engineering skills of insight, perspective, focus and judgement which are particularly relevant to humanitarian practice.

Our Body of Knowledge (BOK) will incorporates links to existing bodies of knowledge and resources for Humanitarian Engineering and related fields and professions, as well as a collection of case studies, practice notes and papers/articles addressing current issues in this domain. These will be complemented by webinars to explore topics of interest and encourage discussion and knowledge sharing through our discussion forums.

We invite you to help drive the success and value of HECoP by contributing to our Forums with comments and discussion topics.