Daniel Almagor is like a child in a lolly shop when he speaks of the village in Bali that has just got running water for the first time.

Mr Almagor, RMIT University Alumnus of the Year for 2009, heads Melbourne-based Engineers Without Borders Australia (EWB), the not-for-profit company responsible for the new water supply.

One by one, villages in Tenganan in eastern Bali were connected to clean, flowing water, liberating villagers from the slog normally associated with accessing supplies.

“These villagers had to walk about two hours to get access to water,” Mr Almagor said. “There’s a stream and a spring they got the water from. We helped them get the water from the spring to the villages and we just connected up the furthest village away.

“They’d never had running water before, they always had to walk down to the spring to get water and it was traditionally the women who did the work.’’

It is achievements like this that helped earn Mr Almagor the coveted title of RMIT’s Alumnus of the Year 2009.