Welcome back to another episode of the SheCanEngineer Podcast. Following on from the INWED celebrations, we chat to Francesca O’Hanlon, an innovator and inventor who uses her Engineering expertise and entrepreneurship skills to solve a very real problem.
Francesca is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and Founder and CEO of Blue Tap, a social enterprise that has developed affordable household water treatment technology. Blue Tap has run water treatment projects in Uganda and Kenya and is beginning a new project in India in the summer of 2022. Francesca founded Blue Tap after working for the charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) for two years in South Sudan and the Central African Republic, where she coordinated the water supply for emergency hospitals in conflict settings. Francesca has won a National Geographic Explorers Award for her work for Blue Tap and for her PhD research in climate resilience and water security.
In this episode, we discuss how even though engineers are the ones with the good ideas, taking that risk to commericialise these ideas and products can seem such a big scary step, but there are ways to do this with relatively low risk. Francesca also highlights how even if your business fails, you are still a success in other ways, as well as key role models who inspired her in her career.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did and. As ever, we would love to hear from you and anything you would like to share on this topic!
SheCanEngineer team
