Against the odds: Khan Younis Formula Student team off to Silverstone
25 July 2011
An ambitious team of young men and women from Gaza’s Khan Younis Training Center (KYTC) has overcome the odds by placing in the Formula Student competition, an international engineering competition for university students from around the world. The students won third place for what has been described as their “brilliant business plan,” and placed 13th in the overall competition. The team built their car almost entirely out of recycled and discarded parts, including an old motorcycle engine.
The KYTC formula team has faced a number of unique challenges while seeking to compete in this year’s competition. The ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip has decimated the engineering sector in the region, and Israeli authorities confiscated vital auto parts needed to complete the car. The students had to improvise by substituting even more parts from scrap metal and broken down vehicles. Later, the British embassy in Jordan initially denied their request for visas to travel to the UK, as the students had not yet secured adequate funding for travel and accommodation expenses. Stefan Edlis—a retired, prominent businessman from Chicago—made a generous donation of $20,000 through American Friends of UNRWA, providing the last of the funds necessary for the team to travel and compete.
The Formula Student Competition One of Europe’s biggest student motorsport competitions, challenging students from around the world to design, build and race a single-seat racing car from scratch. Each year, the contest serves as a talent-nurturing and recruitment event for companies such as Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz and Shell.
While in the UK, the team met prominent members of the local Palestinian community and visited the UK Houses of Parliament to brief members of the House of Commons and the Lords about their positive experiences in England. MP Mark Menzies and Baroness Morris of Bolton hosted the visit.
In line with its human development mandate, UNRWA established the Khan Younis Training Center four years ago with funds from Norway, the USA, and Abu Dhabi. The center provides Gazan youth with training in marketable technical fields, designed to both increase employability and inject skilled labor into the local economy. Many of the autotronics students on KYTC’s Formula team are from families described by UNRWA as living in “abject poverty,” surviving off of $2-3 a day. The head of the Khan Younis Training Centre, Dr Ghassan Abu-Orf said: “I am so proud of my students and I am delighted that we were able to showcase the genius of Gaza to international audiences. We will be back at Silverstone, I have no doubt.”
Read more at unrwa.org.
