Global Programs

Engineering for Sustainable Development 

ASME’s Engineering for Sustainable Development group strives to improve the quality of life of people and the planet by building the engineering workforce, capacity and innovation around the world to solve urgent, local and global challenges, and achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Increasingly, engineers are seeking to use their skills to create social and environmental impact - ESD delivers a portfolio of programs delivering knowledge, training and platforms connecting and catalyzing the engineering community at every stage of their career. Interested in supporting our efforts? Please, fill out this form.

Learn more about our work and the state of engineering for sustainable development in our whitepaper.

Engineering For Change

Engineering For Change (E4C) is a knowledge organization and a digital community dedicated to preparing, educating and activating the international engineering workforce to improve the quality of life of people and the planet. We do this by cultivating change agents and providing resources, platforms, and access to expertise to accelerate the development of solutions and infuse engineering into sustainable development. Our global community of over 1 million people believes that engineering can change the world.

E4C Fellowship

The E4C Fellowship is a workforce development program at the intersection of engineering and sustainable development, serving to activate and empower early-career engineers and technical professionals worldwide to solve local and global challenges. E4C Fellows work remotely with diverse, interdisciplinary, multi-sector teams and develop their professional and technical skills by investigating, optimizing, and designing to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The work directly advances partner's sustainability initiatives through the Impact Projects they support and are published via ASME’s global digital platform - Engineering for Change, expanding the engineering knowledge base and amplifying its use and impact. Learn more about our impact in our Engineering for Change Fellowship Dashboard.

IDEA LAB

Bringing impactful hardware solutions to market is a complex process. ASME is dedicated to providing social innovators with the tools, training, guidance, and seed grants needed to succeed on the journey.  Idea Lab is ASME’s incubator of early stage ventures that have not yet reached the prototyping stages of product development. 

 

ISHOW

The ASME Innovation Showcase (ISHOW) is an international accelerator for hardware-led social innovations/ventures in the prototyping stages to get them through to manufacture and ultimately scaled to market. Regional ISHOWs are hosted annually in India, Kenya, and the United States, where social entrepreneurs access ISHOW’s global network of engineers, designers, investors, and entrepreneurs for the support needed to scale innovative prototypes into market-ready products that address one or more of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

ASME ISHOW annually matches up to 30 carefully selected innovators with appropriate engineering experts to ensure that the proposed hardware solutions are technologically, environmentally, culturally, and financially sustainable. These subject-area experts provide technical and strategic guidance based on ISHOW’s four key pillars: customer/user knowledge, hardware validation, manufacturing optimization, and implementation strategy. Innovators receive product exposure, advice, technical insights, seed grants, in-kind support, design services, and marketing assets, as well as access to ISHOW’s growing alumni network and partner ecosystem. To date, ISHOW has enabled over 150 startups from more than 20 countries to solve critical quality-of-life challenges for people in underserved communities worldwide. Learn more about our impact here in our ISHOW Dashboard.

Research Community

Engineering Global Development Research Community is a growing group of academic researchers dedicated to the development of academic research in the field of engineering for social impact. The group is lead by the EGD Research Committee and strives to enhance researchers’ academic legitimacy and publishing and funding opportunities.