Panel Session: Bringing Humanitarian Engineering into ECE Programs through Electricity Access Education

This paper describes a panel session on electricity access education. Electricity access refers to the provision of electricity to populations that do not have access to the electrical grid, usually in under-resourced settings. Around the world, over 600 million people do not have access to electricity. Yet, there is little coverage of this topic in U.S. universities. There is also a need for a significant increase in U.S. workforce development in the electric energy sector as many people in this field are close to retirement age and the transition from fossil fuels may require a significant increase in energy engineers. Topics related to humanitarian engineering have been found to attract a diverse range of students and motivate students to engage in and persist through their engineering education. Yet, few students who are involved in humanitarian projects major in electrical engineering. Recognizing the importance of this topic, the U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored two workshops in 2022 and 2023 with the goal of identifying approaches to enhance and expand electricity access education at the undergraduate engineering level in the U.S., primarily within electrical engineering. In this panel session, we discuss electricity access, highlight the results from these workshops, discuss approaches to incorporating electricity access into the electrical engineering curriculum, survey the attendees on their interest in and expertise regarding electricity access, and brainstorm next steps for curricular development in this area. Thus, we aim to increase awareness of engineering educators about opportunities to incorporate electricity access learning in their courses and continue to build a community of engineering educators interested in electricity access education.