Contractor Juan Gomez and local resident Roni Ramos work on the foundation of a water plant in Ojojona, a village in Honduras. The Ojojona plant, a project of Cornell-based AguaClara, is a few weeks away from completion.

A project to share skills and knowledge with Hondurans for building drinking water treatment systems in rural areas has brought national recognition for Cornell engineering students and instructors.

Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW), a 30-chapter national organization founded five years ago at Cornell, has awarded the Cornell-based AguaClara its Best Project Award. The project, which was competing against several sustainability programs across the nation, received the award at the ESW Conference in Iowa City, Sept. 27-30.

AguaClara -- Spanish for clear water -- involves engineering students who research and design the technologies and then train Hondurans to build and operate the water treatment plants. Coordinated by Cornell civil and environmental engineering senior lecturer Monroe Weber-Shirk, the multiyear effort has focused on rural Honduran communities where clean drinking water is not available.

In the program, student teams research and develop technologies that meet the challenges of developing communities throughout the world. The constraints they face include the need to produce clean water without using electrical power and to build the facilities at a cost of less than $10 per person using locally available materials.

"One of the big goals for this project is to transfer knowledge," Weber-Shirk said. "And not just a particular design, but to transfer knowledge so Hondurans can go on building these plants." For this reason, AguaClara is partnered with the Honduras organization Agua Para el Pueblo -- "water for people." Agua Para el Pueblo is now a few weeks away from finishing a water plant in the Honduran town of Ojojona, Weber-Shirk said.

ESW Director of External Relations Leti McNeill said that the Best Project reviewing team looked for quality of partner organizations, academic integrity, integration into coursework, technical difficulty and overall impact.

"I think they stood out as hitting all those categories really well," McNeill said.