‘A deep respect for the engineering profession’s commitment to serving society’

March 22 is World Water Day, an annual United Nations Observance that aims to celebrate water and inspire action to tackle the global water crisis. In advance of World Water Day, the Green&White connected with University of Saskatchewan graduate Shauna Curry (BE’94), who serves as the CEO of the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST).

The quotes for this Green&White article are drawn from a written speech that Curry prepared for the C.J. Mackenzie Gala—the USask College of Engineering’s flagship event—in January 2025. Curry served as the Distinguished Lecturer for the annual event, where engineering professionals, leading companies and organizations, and USask engineering alumni join students, faculty, and staff from the college to celebrate a distinguished graduate who delivers a keynote address. Each year, the C.J. Mackenzie Gala recognizes the achievements of a member of the alumni community who has attained a position of eminence within their profession. The graduate is honoured as the evening’s Distinguished Lecturer and is inducted into the College of Engineering’s Alumni Wall of Distinction.

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Shauna Curry (BE’94) has always enjoyed being in and around water. In fact, when she thinks back to some fond childhood memories, they include swimming at the pool at the University of Saskatchewan (USask)—where her father, Bill Curry (HECADM’94), and her mother, Dale Dewar (MD’78), were students.

“Some of my earliest memories are swimming in rivers and lakes, and in pools—most of all, the one here at the University of Saskatchewan,” said Shauna Curry, who later followed in her parents’ footsteps and enrolled at USask, earning a degree in agricultural and bioresource engineering in 1994.

Curry shared the childhood swimming anecdote during a speech earlier this year, when she served as the Distinguished Lecturer at the 48th C.J. Mackenzie Gala, which was held in Saskatoon on Jan. 28, 2025. Today, as an award-winning USask graduate and the CEO of the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST), Curry continues to credit USask and her parents for instilling in her an interest in water, a curiosity about the world around her, and a willingness to try to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges.

CAWST, based in Calgary, Alta., is a licensed not-for-profit professional engineering consultancy that teaches people how to bring safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene into their homes, schools, and clinics, using simple, affordable technologies. Given Curry’s affinity for water, her desire to make a positive impact on the world, and her background in engineering, it’s perhaps not surprising that she now leads CAWST, an organization that envisions a world where people can succeed because their basic water and sanitation needs have been met.

During her C.J. Mackenzie Gala speech, Curry shared a memory from when she was four years old, canoeing in northern Saskatchewan with her parents.

“We would dip our cups over the side of the canoe and drink the water straight from the river,” she said.

That positive memory starkly contrasts another childhood experience.

“A few years later, we were in Mexico for one of my father’s conferences and, to my surprise, the tap water was unsafe to drink,” Curry recalled.

“It was also my first experience witnessing extreme poverty—an eight-year-old mind struggled to grasp the reality of 25 million people in Mexico City living without safe drinking water. My mother, now a physician, told me unsafe water would make me, and entire populations of children my age, sick. And if they were sick, they couldn’t play, swim, learn, or go to school—something I incidentally loved.

“Thanks to my parents giving me windows into the wider world, I was exposed to the pain of inequity, injustice, and war, and also to the amazing fortitude, capability, and potential of people to make a difference in their lives, for those around us, and across the globe. These early experiences were gifts from the University of Saskatchewan and my parents. You instilled curiosity and provided me a gateway to the world and the desire to make a difference.”

As a USask student, Curry felt at home in the College of Engineering, appreciating its “ethos of thinking that where there’s a problem, we can solve it.” Upon graduating with her Bachelor of Engineering degree, she began working in industry with that ethos in mind.

“My time in the College of Engineering anchored my thinking and reinforced my desire to tackle big problems at their root cause and make a meaningful difference in the world,” she said. “Graduation came with a deep respect for the engineering profession’s commitment to serving society, humbly represented by our little iron rings.”

When Curry was 28, the company she was working for was sold, leading her to question the next steps in her engineering career. For as long as she could remember, Curry had wanted to learn Spanish and to get to know Latin America. She was also interested in learning more about the ways people use technology and the natural world to build healthier communities.

This all led her to hop on her bicycle and head south through the United States to Latin America—covering 14,000 kilometres across 14 countries. Water became a key part of the journey.

“All along the way, people invited me into their homes, schools, and workplaces, which gave me a window into their daily lives,” she recalled. “I experienced a wide variety of conditions, climates, and economic brackets. One family in Peru stands out. Living as subsistence farmers in the Andes, their plot of land was bordered by a river—truly picturesque. But when it came time to use their latrine—a basic outhouse—it surprised me to open the door. The hole was positioned right over the rushing river below.

“When I shared the idea of a composting toilet and the benefits of turning the waste into fertilizer for their agricultural production, the father and son got right into it. A design was sketched out, and we talked about what it would take to construct, operate, and use it effectively. My motivation was to protect the river and to help the family, while theirs was their livelihood.

“All throughout Latin America, I filtered my own water daily and was inspired by the beauty of the landscape, and the goodness of people. The problem of poverty and development was on my mind a lot, witnessing countless development projects gone wrong or not built to last.”

Curry wondered how she could use her engineering background to help not just one or two families, but hundreds. She also thought about the impact that waterborne diseases can have on human health. Current numbers indicate that 2.2 billion people around the world live without safe drinking water, and 3.5 billion people live without safely managed sanitation, she said.

“If an infant or young child is sick from waterborne diseases, with high exposure to pathogens, it can permanently affect mental and physical development and can even shorten their lifespan,” Curry noted. “This is the case for more than one-third of children under the age of five, according to the World Health Organization and a 2022 Global Nutrition Report.”    

When Curry returned to Canada from her cycling trip and continued working as an environmental engineer in Calgary, these thoughts and concerns about water still occupied her mind and her heart. Water would soon become an even bigger part of her life.

“I volunteered for this fledgling start-up, called CAWST—the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology—and found my cause,” she said. “It’s one focused on a big, sticky problem impacting billions of people.”

In 2004, Curry officially joined CAWST as an employee, at the time working out of founder Camille Dow Baker’s basement. Baker, an engineer who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to Canada in 1975, had experience working as an executive in the oil and gas industry. When she met USask alumnus Dr. David Manz (BE’72, MSc’74)—an engineer and professor who invented the Manz BioSand Water Filter—CAWST was born.

Curry noted that Manz, who previously served as the C.J. Mackenzie Gala Distinguished Lecturer in 2010, had, through his goal to bring clean water to people’s homes, “cracked a problem that others had tried and failed.”

“He took a community-scale, 200-year-old proven technology and figured out how it could be used in the home. Prior to David, people had focused on the size, while trying to have it run continuously, which is a key parameter for a slow sand filter to work effectively,” Curry said.

“David’s criteria (were) human-centred—the filter needed to run intermittently, because that’s how people use water. No movable parts, and no energy required—because many places have intermittent or no electricity. (Other) criteria was that people could be readily trained.”

The biosand filter works by using microorganisms that are already in the water—such as bacteria, viruses, and parasites that can make people ill—to clean the water. Over a few weeks, a micro-biological ecosystem forms at the top of the sand and increases the effectiveness from 60 per cent removal of bacteria to 70 per cent to 85 per cent—and sometimes to very close to 100 per cent, Curry said. While biosand filters are not the most advanced technology available, they are human-centred and cost-effective solutions that people use—so they work. Biosand filters are making a difference in homes around the globe.

“David and the University of Calgary did something that is pretty unusual: they made the biosand filter patent open and gave CAWST the humanitarian rights for the distribution of the filter,” said Curry. “They didn’t hold onto it; they let it go—a philosophy that is a basis for our success still to this day.”

Cury said the advantage of technologies like the biosand filter are that people can use them almost immediately, with little training, and they work effectively. For example, research from Bangladesh has shown that simply pouring water through a sari cloth can reduce cholera by 50 per cent, she said.

“And here’s one potentially life-saving tip to take home from my lecture: if you’re ever stranded, put clear water in a plastic bottle and expose it to sunlight for a day to disinfect the water.  It can be that simple to save someone’s life,” said Curry.

“David came up with the technical innovation. Camille designed our business model, an institutional innovation, and I’ve been part of the team to figure out, implement, and scale our model,” she added.

CAWST is both a licensed professional engineering firm and a registered Canadian charity. This hybrid model is important, as the majority of CAWST’s clients are unable to pay for the organization’s services, said Curry.

“Our mission is to provide training, consulting, and act as a centre of expertise in water and sanitation for the poor in low- and middle-income countries. Simply put, we take science and turn it into training on affordable technologies and practices that people can implement themselves right away,” she said.

“And, just as the technologies need to be human-centred, so does our training model. Initially, we thought people would come to Canada to take our training. In one of our first workshops, participants from India and Pakistan invited us to their countries, and it became clear that a distributed training model—delivered where people live—was far more effective.

“We are now a small but mighty team of 50 professionals who have collectively worked in over 82 countries and speak 30 languages.” 

Since CAWST’s inception in 2001, it has already impacted more than 50 million people worldwide. Under Curry’s leadership, the organization is working toward reaching another 50 million by 2030. Curry is a passionate advocate for equitable resource distribution and believes that education is key to lasting, sustainable change. Her dedication to CAWST’s mission reflects her lifelong commitment to improving lives through community empowerment. For her many contributions to CAWST and more, Curry was named as one of six 2023 winners of the University of Saskatchewan Alumni Achievement Awards, one of the university’s highest honours.

Each year, Alumni Achievement Awards are presented to notable USask alumni for their accomplishments and impact on their communities and the world. Curry received the Outstanding Impact Alumni Achievement Award, which recognizes an extraordinary graduate who is making significant personal and professional contributions in society, demonstrating exceptional leadership in their field(s) of endeavour, and maintaining a standard of excellence that inspires their colleagues and peers, with promise of future achievement and resulting in a demonstrable betterment of their community. 

In a 2023 interview, Curry was unequivocal when asked if her engineering education has helped her develop the tools she’s needed in her career.

“Yes, 100 per cent,” she said in the interview. “The knowledge and skills that we get from the classroom and the labs, combined with the engineering ethics and being of service, the focus on problem-solving and making the world a better place, enabled me to further develop the ability to take initiative on almost anything.”

In her C.J. Mackenzie Gala speech, Curry took a moment to speak directly to the engineering students in attendance. She noted that all of them can make a meaningful difference in the world, no matter their interests, passions, or skills. She also encouraged the students to “keep water in your mind,” because “without water, life simply doesn’t exist.”

“Your problem-solving minds are greatly needed wherever life takes you,” she said. “Embrace it and let your talents drive change. The world needs more engineers who see complexity not as a barrier, but are drawn to it as a fascinating challenge, and bring others along with them.”