Project ideas reflect creativity, expertise and social commitment of the international teams.

High level of involvement: 3,200 participants from 89 countries in the Mondialogo Engineering Award 2007.

STUTTGART, Germany, PARIS and MUMBAI, India, December 11, 2007 /PRNewswire/ -- On Monday evening Daimler and UNESCO presented the Mondialogo Engineering Award with its prize money amounting to 300,000 euros in Mumbai, India. In a festive ceremony, an international jury awarded the honors for sustainable technical improvements in developing countries to the ten best project teams from 15 countries. For six months, the teams had been working together across continents on joint project proposals.

During the award ceremony, Prof Bharat Balasubramanian, Director of Group Research & Advanced Engineering at Daimler AG, was impressed by both the creativity and social commitment shown by the students. "I'm delighted to see that promising young engineers are not only working for their own careers but are also putting their ideas, knowledge and above all a great level of social awareness into the challenges of the future and are actively tackling the problems in the poor regions of this world."

Among the ten award-winners are three teams from the US. The students from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, and their peers from the Jagannath Institute for Technology and Management, Orissa, India, designed affordable, solar-charged, battery-operated LED lanterns to replace oil lamps in developing countries. Oil lamps are expensive, inefficient and noxious and cause serious health problems among the rural population. Engineering students from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah partnered with a team from the Birzeit University, Deir Quaddis, Palestinian Territories, and invented a simple filtration system to treat hazardous wastewater produced by olive oil mills in the Palestinian Territories. The third American award-winning team is from the John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. Together with their partners from Zakhe Agricultural College, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, they developed an easy-to-use ram pump for sustainable water supply in rural areas of South Africa.

In addition to the ten award winners, a further 20 international teams who had been nominated for the final received an Honorable Mention carrying 5,000 euros in prize money, among them students from further 10 American universities. This made the students from the US the most successful in the Award scheme.

During the Mondialogo Engineering Award ceremony, another special prize was presented for lasting dialogue. The "Continuation Award" honored two teams from Papua New Guinea and the USA who had already won a Mondialogo Engineering Award with different partners during the first edition. The students had met at the Mondialogo Symposium and then submitted a joint project for this year's contest.

Nominations for the award-winners had already been decided in advance by a high-ranking jury made up of prominent scientists and representatives of engineering from all over the world. Key criteria in the jury's assessment of the projects were creativity, quality, feasibility and the degree to which they address the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. The intensity of intercultural dialogue and the knowledge exchange between the engineering students also played a crucial role in the decision.

The engineering contest is a constituent part of the Mondialogo initiative launched by Daimler and UNESCO in October 2003. Mondialogo also includes an international schools contest for high school students between 14 and 18 years of age. Through the Mondialogo Engineering Award, Daimler and UNESCO want to promote intercultural dialogue and the knowledge transfer between institutions and engineering students on all continents and to promote mutual understanding, respect and tolerance. At the same time, the contest is intended to produce sustainable solutions for problems in developing countries.

Every project team is made up of groups of students from two technical universities or colleges, with one group coming from a developing country and the other from an industrialized nation. The teams had six months to work on a technical solution that will have a direct practical benefit for the population of a developing country and help to improve the quality of life there.

Although the implementation of the proposed solutions is not part of the Mondialogo Engineering Award, eleven ideas developed during the first edition of the engineering contest have resulted in concrete projects. Examples include new methods of drinking water preparation, the development of biofuels and the use of solar energy in rural areas.

More information on Mondialogo, the nominees for the Engineering Award and the members of the jury is available at www.mondialogo.org.

Daimler AG

Daimler AG

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