Alaa and Florence are volunteering as a part of Design,Travel + Build, Cambodia to help build the Agricultural Technology (Agri-Tech) centre!

The Agri-Tech centre is designed to teach the locals of Samrong, an underprivileged community, farming techniques which are more economically viable and environmentally friendly. This will help generate jobs, food and income for the locals and improve their local economy. Currently there is a vast lack of jobs in the area, resulting in people leaving school early and their families to find jobs in Thailand, as they are close to the border.

BuroHappold were involved during initial stage engineering input (Structural, Sustainability, MEP, Water, Ground Engineering) to assist GreenShoots Foundation in the design and construction of an agricultural training centre. Now that the project is at construction stage, our team, which consist of a sustainability consultant (Alaa Alfakara) and a geotechnical engineer (Florence Wong), would like to continue the support. We are volunteering, as we are passionate about sustainability and sharing skills to improve the quality of life for people. Florence was an advocate for knowledge sharing at BuroHappold as the Knowledge Sharing Representative on the Young Engineers Forum. It is very important to teach the community to enable them to upskill so they can become self-sufficient and pass on skills to future generations.