Move on in: UNSW students collaborate with industry and Rawimapct.org to design and build housing in Cambodia. Move on in: UNSW students collaborate with industry and Rawimapct.org to design and build housing in Cambodia. Photo: Rawimpact.org

What sort of house can be built for $2000? In rural Cambodia, the sort that transforms lives.

For $2000, such a house is a solid construction orientated to withstand monsoon conditions, with corrugated iron replacing the usual bamboo and palm-leaf roofing, wide eaves for passive shading and a well-ventilated interior that suits the realities of cooking on charcoal.

The build labour is free, and comes courtesy of students undertaking UNSW's Sustainable Energy for Developing Countries course. The building design, too, is courtesy of the students, working in collaboration with professional engineers and architects in Australia and Cambodia, the global engineering consultancy firm Cundall, and the non-profit RAW Impact, a charity involved in sustainable projects.

"The students get the opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with professionals," says Dr Anna Bruce, postgraduate coursework co-ordinator at UNSW's School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering. "Not just during the design and planning, but also in the field, where they're making adjustments to the design in response to local conditions."

Those local conditions include the necessity of assessing energy use and adopting practical solutions. 

Cundall, RAW Impact and the students helped raise the money to fund the build and travel to Cambodia's Chaom Trach village."We knew the value of this sort project work, because we'd done it in the past. But the partnership with Cundall and RAW Impact has enabled us to provide this opportunity for our students without directly resourcing it ourselves," Bruce says.

The Sustainable Energy for Developing Countries course is open to both postgraduate and undergraduate students and draws in students from engineering, renewable energy, architecture, and built environment studies. 

The journey to Cambodia took place earlier this year, at the end of the course itself, and although there is no requirement to travel, Bruce believes the wider benefits of the experience for students, both personally and for their careers, is significant.

"Their enthusiasm for this kind of work was rekindled by the experience of the trip," she says. "It's very empowering for students that they are making a useful contribution by doing actual engineering work, as well as gaining insights into the lives of people in developing countries."

Cundall has a long-standing connection with UNSW as an employer and sponsor of graduates. This partnership between campus and industry is "a good fit with Cundall's perspective of building a collaborative future", says its spokesman Alistair Coulstock.

"There are several things that make this real for the students," he says. "They're designing something that could actually get built, but importantly, Cundall's input into the course emulates the standard tendering process in the construction industry."

Poverty is a leading cause of human trafficking in Cambodia, especially in remote areas, motivating RawImpact to seek to help lift families out of poverty through work, which includes building sustainable housing as part of its Collaborative Future Cambodia - Build Against the Traffick campaign.

A meeting between Coulstock and RAW Impact's Troy Roberts gave rise to the idea of Cundall lending its professional experience to UNSW and for a practical, built outcome to be part of the academic study. 

Cundall now has a direct input into the course, writing the brief and background documents for the project, sourcing professional architects and engineers to work in Sydney with students and judging the students' winning design. 

Students then built two houses in Cambodia this year, using local materials, and Coulstock says many in the Australian contingent plan to undertake more volunteer work. 

"In business, we often get trained to leave our morals at the door," he says. "Trips like this help us to take into account other people's perspectives, and not make decisions purely on a financial basis. It's essential for people to understand how the other 99 per cent live."

: A second Collaborative Future Cambodia - Build Against the Traffick project has begun, both on campus as part of the UNSW Sustainable Energy in Developing Countries course and on the ground in Cambodia. This year more than 60 students are enrolled. The collaboration between UNSW, Cundall and RAWImpact will see a multipurpose building constructed at Ko Ki village, about six hours' north-east of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. See rawimpact.org.