Thousands of kilometers separate them, yet they hardly left each other's side for five days. For a week, two Veoliaforce volunteers from Veolia North America taught NGO employees based in various African countries how to use Epanet, the reference tool for hydraulic modeling.
Eight employees of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), a humanitarian organization present in over 40 countries, now know how to analyze and design small water networks. How do they do it? They took a five-day training course led by Veoliaforce experts, one based in Texas, the other in Virginia, to use Epanet, an open-source software package for modeling hydraulic networks.
Amanda Reichert and Sean Fisher, both from Veolia North America, were commissioned by the Veolia Foundation to prepare a training course and adapt it to NRC employees. The training enabled each of the trainees, based in different countries, to appropriate the tool and test it on problems in their direct environment.
This Veoliaforce mission, carried out remotely, made it possible to deliver expertise as close as possible to humanitarian needs. It had been preceded in France by a similar mission led by Simon Rival, a Veoliaforce volunteer who had trained Médecins Sans Frontières staff. Together with Guy de Sainte-Claire, another Veolia Water volunteer, he provided technical support to Amanda Reichert and Sean Fisher in preparing the best teaching content.
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What is The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) ?
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is an independent humanitarian organisation helping people forced to flee. Around 15,000 humanitarians work with the Norwegian Refugee Council. Most of them are hired locally to work in the field, and a small number are based at the head office in Oslo.
Sean Fisher going over the basics of water system design and hydraulics on the first day.
Amanda Reichert helps the students go through a real world example on the fifth day.
Key figures
5 days of training
2 trainers
8 learners
Photo credit © NRC