An engineer's global path
Engineers Without Borders and the Mortenson Center inspired Recent Alumni Award winner Christina Barstow to pursue a career in global development.
When people think of global development work, they often think of long days of manual labor.
But Recent Alumni Award winner Christina Barstow (MCivEngr'10, PhD'16) said a big part of the work is happening in a very different setting.
“There’s a misconception that all international development work is like Peace Corps where you’re working at the village level without access to services,” she said. “But there is really hard work being done in the city, building partnerships with governments in order to ensure longevity of programs.”
Barstow credits her engineering education with giving her the problem-solving skills and global knowledge she’s needed to be successful.
“I think the development sector generally is just a series of challenges happening every minute of the day,” she said. “There is no problem that is straightforward.”
Finding Her Path
Barstow said engineering has always been something she was supposed to do. Because she was good at math and science, teachers encouraged her to pursue engineering, saying it would be easy for her.
That turned out to be partly true, she said.
“To be totally honest, I had a really easy time in high school,” Barstow said. “And then undergrad was very hard – it was the hardest school that I’ve ever had to do.”
While she was glad that she had the “academic chops” to persevere, being deep in the technical side of engineering made her realize she didn’t want to pursue a technical career.
“While I felt really aligned with my skillset from a technical side, I needed something more,” she said.
When she joined Engineers Without Borders her junior year, she knew she had found it. Her first in-country project was in Rwanda, which would become her second home over the next 13 years.
Barstow stayed at CU Boulder for her master’s through the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering and continued to help lead EWB’s Rwanda team. But when her advisor, Professor Karl Linden, suggested she stay on for a PhD, she realized it was time to get back out in the field.
“I was like, ‘Cool, but I have to leave the lab,’” she said. She moved to Rwanda on a fellowship to study UV water disinfection. As she was wrapping up her degree, she connected with fellow CU Engineering alumnus and Recent Alumni Award winner Evan Thomas, who was working in Rwanda as chief operating officer of DelAgua Health.
Thomas recruited Barstow to help design a large-scale program to deliver cookstoves and water filters to Rwandan homes.
“That was a really, really exceptional program, and to this day I would say one of the coolest things that I’m going to get to do in in my career,” she said. “It's a nationwide program that affected over half a million people and led to a 30 percent reduction in diarrheal diseases in children under five.”
Building Bridges
Barstow’s work in Rwanda eventually led to her current position. She and Bridges to Prosperity CEO Avery Bang (MCivEngr’09), another Recent Alumni Award winner, had met through Engineers Without Borders and followed each other’s careers from there.
In 2012, while Barstow was working with DelAgua, Bang approached her about consulting with Bridges to Prosperity to start a pedestrian bridge-building program in Rwanda.
“I got one bridge going, got all the partnerships set up and got it registered as an NGO and then was able to hand it off to a very capable Bridges to Prosperity Country Director,” all within about six months, she said.
She returned to Bridges to Prosperity full-time after another few years in Rwanda and two years at the Millennium Challenge Corporation in Washington, D.C. Bang was looking to move the organization into a new direction that would allow them to scale up their global impact, a strategy that appealed to Barstow.
Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has given them a chance to further refine that strategy, this time on their work in East Africa and on expanding their partnerships with other development organizations.
“We’re entering this exciting phase of moving into this much more global strategic plan around advocacy and trying to figure out how to build a coalition around this work, which is really exciting,” she said.
While Barstow thinks someday in the future she’ll return to the water, sanitation and hygiene sector, working with Bridges to Prosperity has reaffirmed how closely all global development efforts are interconnected.
“One of the reasons that I became interested in Bridges to Prosperity was this inability for people to get places, including to clean drinking water,” she said. “I’m excited for what the organization is going to do in the upcoming years.”