The Inaugural International Water Innovation Challenge

On May 31^st two plumbing apprentices and an undergraduate engineering student from RMIT University will fly to Singapore to compete against a team from the USA in the inaugural Water Innovation Challenge.

This exciting new team event will be part of Singapore’s annual International Water Week. It is sponsored by the WorldSkills Foundation, and supported by the World Plumbing Council, RMIT and WorldSkills Australia, and will involve the teams in three activities:

• Prior to the competition each team designs a sustainable sanitation system suitable for a Bangladesh village;
• Over three days at the competition each team designs a system suitable for the environmental conditions found in a typical village in rural Nepal;
• During the fourth day of the competition, the teams complete a series of practical plumbing tasks.

While the two teams will engage in serious competition during the event, both the Australian and US team leaders are cooperating to realise two important underlying aims of this pilot event: to demonstrate how young people can become engaged in the WorldSkills Foundation program of advocacy, community development and research; and to bring the two inaugural teams together after the event as global ambassadors for the ongoing Innovation Challenge.