MAKING life better for families in a village in Batam is one of the ways by which students from Singapore Polytechnic (SP) are making a difference to the lives of the less fortunate.
Following their efforts, the village on the Indonesian island now has a fresh source of income - a fish farm converted from an abandoned sandpit.
Annual household income for each of the 11 families in Mata Ikan involved in the project is expected to go up by 57 per cent, from 10.9 million rupiah (S$1,580) to 17 million rupiah from September last year to September this year.
Finding a new use for the pit has also stopped it from being a breeding ground for mosquitoes and reduced the risk of villagers getting dengue fever or malaria.
This was one of SP's community projects which helped it clinch the top spot in the Students in Free Enterprise (Sife) national competition last month.
At the annual competition, teams from tertiary institutions here outline community projects they have initiated and are judged by the impact of their work.
There are Sife groups at three universities and four polytechnics in Singapore. SP's group has 437 students from different disciplines involved in a total of 14 local and overseas projects.
Final-year environmental management and water technology student Lim Renhui, 18, is among those involved in the Batam project.
He said that a few members of his group had done a site visit earlier and brought back photos but it was hard for the rest to visualise the actual situation.
'The sandpit was quite big - about the size of two to three football fields - and deep, which we couldn't tell from the photos. The ground was also not as strong as we thought,' he said.
This meant they had to tweak plans by building a floating bridge across the sandpit instead of an anchored bridge.
At this year's competition, the polytechnic also presented two other community projects.
At one project in the town of Concepcion in the Philippines, 25 Sife team members taught 28 women the art of making kaya, or coconut jam. These women will in turn pass on the recipe to 400 others in the area.
Since 2004, more than 200 students have also helped in the replanting of mangrove saplings along the coastline to increase the catch for about 7,000 fishermen.
SP's third Sife initiative was a competition for secondary school students to come up with innovative business ideas which they then had to present to a panel of judges. About 4,300 students have participated in this project since its launch in 2004.
The SP team will represent Singapore in the international leg of the competition in Berlin in October and compete with 40 other teams.
The pressure is on after SP's seniors came fourth at last year's Sife World Cup - the highest ranking attained by a Singapore team.
But Mohamed Abbas Sheyed Ebramsa, 18, a final-year banking &finance and applied business psychology student who will go to Germany to co-present the projects, said the real success is helping others: 'It's not just about winning. It's about impacting lives. Even if we lose, we will still continue with the projects.'
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