BY MBONGENI NDLELA
MBABANE – The Eswatini Bridge Programme (Tebetebe) is a collaboration that keeps on giving to the people of Eswatini. During a celebration of the programme today, it was announced that 5 Emaswati engineers will be going to the United States to train and gain knowledge on the enterprise of building bridges.
The Eswatini Bridge Programme is a collaboration between the Microprojects unit under the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development and the US-founded non-profit organisation, Engineers in Action (EIA). In the course of the programme, 11 bridges have been built with an investment of over E70 million in total by the different stakeholders in the project.
The programme is increasingly relying on local engineers to do the technical oversight of the developments. The local engineers collaborate with student engineers from US tertiary institution like the universities of Cornell, Notre Dame, Rutgers, Southern Indiana, Colorado Boulder, Illinois, and Canadian McGill University and the University of Toronto. Engineers in Action lead in the country, Brittany Margritz, also highlighted that “All the bridges that were built in 2021 were built by Emaswati as technical overseers.”
We are today celebrating that for the first time, Engineers in Action is making it possible for 5 officers from Microprojects unit to travel to the US to learn the necessary skills to continue the work we have started, and to be able to make sure that the gains that we have made and we are yet to make in this programme are not lost, even when Engineers in Action are back in the US.”
Principal Secretary from the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development Thabsile Mlangeni remarked that “We are today celebrating that, for the first time, Engineers in Action is making it possible for 5 officers from the Microprojects unit to travel to the US to learn the necessary skills to continue the work we have started, and to be able to make sure that the gains that we have made and we are yet to make in this programme are not lost, even when Engineers in Action are back in the US.”
The engineers also received their Visas in readiness for the educational trip. Speaking during the ceremony, one of the engineers, Samukeliso Dlamini, said “we thank this opportunity very much, to Microprojects, to the Ministry and to Engineers in Action. We really appreciate this rare opportunity we don’t how we could have gotten otherwise.” The engineers thanked their colleagues and management for enabling their work, and they also promised that they would represent Microprojects, the ministry, and the country very well as they set to glean engineering knowledge in the USA.
