In 2009, ACREST and IAT partnered with the Global Engineering Program (GEP) at Purdue to enhance technologies currently employed by both organizations. PUPs are increasing productivity, agricultural capacity and efficiency, trade, education and health care.

Purdue students and faculty traveled to Cameroon last summer to help a team of Africans build a basic utility vehicle, or BUV, that would not only carry people and produce from place to place but also perform tasks such as pumping water from wells in undeveloped African villages.

Purdue's Global Engineering Program (GEP) hosted the second annual Global Engineering Design Symposium (GEDS) on January 26, 2013.

Anne Dare, of the Global Engineering Program, has been awarded a grant from US Borlaug Fellows in Global Food Security Program to conduct her doctoral research in wastewater reuse in agriculture in Tunisia and Palestine, as part of a larger study to compare limitations and opportunities, both from a scientific and social perspective, for wastewater reuse in agricultural production in Tunisia, Palestine, Qatar, and the US.

His research project, "Becoming Boundary Spanners: Investigating, Enhancing, and Assessing the Experiences of Early Career Engineers," provides an integrative vision for engineering education and practice based on boundary spanning as a core meta-attribute for 21st-century engineers.

GEP's Basic Utility Vehicle is recognized as a difference maker in global transportation.

Students involved in the Global Design Team for BUV Design won a competition held on April 21, 2012 in Batavia, OH sponsored by the Institute for Affordable Transportation, out of Indianapolis which seeks to improve lives by developing and providing low-cost vehicles.

As one engineer helps deliver clean drinking water with 2,000-year-old technology, another works on the chemistry's cutting edge on breakthroughs for both potable water and clean energy. Chad Jafvert, professor of civil engineering, stepped outside his normal zone of research to collaborate with students in the Global Engineering Program (GEP). The group’s semester project resulted in a real-world solution and better drinking water for schoolchildren in rural Colombia.