Service at the intersection of innovation and entrepreneurship
37 teams entered the final round of the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge. Teams developing new diagnostics, ways of tackling waste, and new business models and systems. Come meet the teams this year! http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/teams
Here’s how to vote.
This week, the Trash Into Art installation is on display in the MIT Stata Center, first floor.
The goal of Trash Into Art is to raise awareness around the value of waste materials such as cardboard, Styrofoam, plastics, metals, and other objects found in a garbage can. A crucial focus is the impact of waste on marginalized people and communities.
This exhibition features student artists who were challenged to collect pieces of waste for a week, and to create a thought-provoking project from materials that would otherwise be thrown away.
The installation is one component of the larger “Waste: Put it to Use” Yunus Challenge, presented by the MIT International Development Initiative in collaboration with MIT D-Lab and the IDEAS Global Challenge.
For more photos, click here.
All teams entering the IDEAS Global Challenge must submit at least one Initial Scope Statement.
This is the last chance to submit and get feedback from volunteers: March 2 by 11:59PM; details online at http://
49 teams are signed up to enter this year’s IDEAS Global Challenge. Nick Holden, helping with his knack for writing and interviewing has created a series of profiles on teams.
Last week, he profiled Team Recovers.org who are working to finesse a tool to harness
and deploy the power of people’s help after a disaster. I included a snippet of the profile below. You can read the entire profile through this link.
Q. What’s innovative about the solution you are proposing to make an impact on disaster recovery?
A. There’s this huge spike in interest after a disaster. Fifty percent of all web searches seeking to help occur in the first seven days after a disaster.
An affected town loses the potential resources it could get from the initial spike in interest because it doesn’t have the capacity to accept the physical or financial resources. Without the proper technology in place, towns can’t capitalize on that early interest, and they are left without a platform to build more interest and no money for recovery.
Every single community that is affected by a disaster is affected by this technological black hole. For example, FEMA makes aid distribution based upon data it receives from communities after a disaster. That data includes how many volunteers worked, where they worked, for how many hours they worked, and what heavy machinery they used. In the first two weeks after a disaster, towns don’t even know that data needs to be tracked, and they don’t have tools to track it.
We’re disaster experts now because we’ve done this before. What we can do is structure the inputs with really easy-to-use software. We can make a button that says: “Where are you sending this volunteer?” Then we give coordinators this software that allows them to track volunteers. Now, FEMA gets their data, and the town gets more money because of it.
We started going into disaster areas as part of our development. Chris [Kuryak] and I just got back from Alabama. In the course of three-and-a-half days, we were able to set up an online recovery hub for a city that was ravaged by tornadoes on Jan. 24.
Using our website, the community has already flagged tons of cases of fraud attempts — of people going to multiple distribution centers. They’ve collected a massive database of donation items, especially things that are too large for people to bring in and store, but that are going to be needed six months to five years down the road, like china cabinets for people who are rebuilding their homes. It was pretty phenomenal proof-of-concept.
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Keep reading over at the MIT News site.
(Great profile, Nick!)
By guest author: Hamsika Chandrasekar
I read Bina’s Notes on “Product Development for the Other 90%” and felt a spark of interest when I came across her description of Embrace, a social enterprise that has developed an innovative, low-cost infant warmer to help keep low-birth-weight and premature infants warm. Thanks to the combined support of the MIT Public Service Center, Baker Foundation, and Kelly-Douglas Fund, I was able to spend the last month in India, working to launch Embrace’s infant warmer at the Shamlaji Tribal Hospital in Gujarat.
This hospital is located in the small village of Shamlaji, about two hours outside Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city. It is managed by a husband and wife doctor team, Drs. Haren Joshi and Pratima Tolat, who ensure that the free treatment provided at Shamlaji Tribal Hospital is of high quality. Working with Embrace, I selected Shamlaji Tribal Hospital for my service project due to its focus on rural healthcare and its high numbers of low birth weight infants. When I arrived at the hospital, I found two packages, both marked ‘most urgent,’ waiting for me in the hospital office. I opened one quickly and happily held up its contents: the Embrace infant warmer. Looking back now, I still remember that sense of excitement and purpose I felt when I unwrapped the device. I couldn’t believe that after all the emails, the training sessions, the conference calls, and the planning, I was finally at Shamlaji Tribal Hospital, working with an organization I had heard about through a TedTalk and immediately loved.
My first day, unwrapping an Embrace infant warmer
I spent nearly three weeks in Gujarat, conversing with the doctors and nurses and showing them how to operate the infant warmer.
During my time there, nine infants benefited from the Embrace product, absorbing the warmer’s heat and gaining weight during their hospital stay. Together, the nurses and I monitored these babies and collected data on each infant. I was happy to see that the nurses quickly became comfortable with the Embrace product, taking it out whenever a newborn weighed between 1.5 kg and 2.5 kg, the recommended weight range for product use.
A (2.5 kg) infant sleeping peacefully in the Embrace infant warmer
The biggest challenge for me was the language barrier: I spoke no Gujarati and very little Hindi, the two most prominent languages in the region. I worked with the hospital staff via an interpreter, pausing at the end of each sentence and allowing her to translate what I had said. With her help, I also explored some of the other healthcare needs in the area, meeting with the head of Shamlaji Village and traveling out to the Himmatnagar Civil Hospital, to which many patients from Shamlaji Tribal Hospital are referred.
For me, this project served not only as an opportunity to perform hands-on service work but also as a reminder of the realities in impoverished regions and the challenges involved in the improvement of rural healthcare. For every baby born in Shamlaji Tribal Hospital, many more are born at home, never receiving proper care and often dying due to preventable reasons. Parents, desperate to have kids that survive past infancy, pay little attention to established family planning methods. Poor education makes it difficult for villagers to comprehend the dangers associated with at-home deliveries and improper antenatal care. Throughout my time in Gujarat, I was reminded of how much more I – and for that matter, anyone in the world – could do to help.
Hamsika Chandrasekar is currently a junior at MIT and a previous PSC expedition grant recipient. She is double majoring in Computational Biology (Course 6-7) and Neuroscience (Course 9), hopes to enroll in medical school following her undergraduate years, and ultimately wants to pursue a career in global health.
Whether it’s helping Mexican university students bridge the gap between industry and academia, or providing Ugandan children with basic health education programs, many teams this year have chosen to tackle the difficult problems facing the global education sector.
In recent years, social innovators have joined the ranks of talented teachers and school administrators in rethinking traditional school models, finding creative ways to improve educational quality and access.
A new policy paper by the McGraw-Hill Research Foundation might be of interest to those pursuing projects related to educational reform.
How Social Entrepreneurship is Helping to Improve Education Worldwide (available online) highlights the distinct contributions of social innovators in helping to improve early childhood education in low-income communities, creating alternate channels for funding, and providing basic skills to at-risk populations across the globe.
Author Rupert Scofield, President and CEO of the Foundation for International Community Assistance, draws from several interesting case studies that illustrate the potential for social enterprise to solve issues ranging from poor educational access to the growing achievement gap. The key to the success of these enterprises, Scofield writes, lies in their ability to effectively utilize business practices emphasizing sustainability and scalability – two important attributes of any winning IDEAS Challenge project! Here are a few examples:
In the Bronx, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDco) not only runs multiple afterschool programs and summer camps, but has also created hundreds of revenue-generating businesses within the community, helping to ensure the continued success and long-term sustainability of its programs.
In India, where harsh inequities prevail and 90 million women remain illiterate, the Mann Deshi Foundation provides vocational training and financial literacy to women in impoverished communities. It also runs the Mann Deshi Business School, which delivers microbusiness courses in mobile classrooms, and the Mann Deshi Mahlia Bank, which provides loans for its business school graduates to start microenterprises.
DonorsChoose.org is a charitable marketplace where teachers can make simple classroom requests, from pencils to microscope slides, for their students. As of August 2011, the website has generated $85 million benefitting more than 5 million schoolchildren in the U.S. The website notably allows individual donors to contribute to its overhead costs (with 76% choosing to do so), and has established diverse funding streams that include multiple corporate sponsors.
We hope that these examples of powerful — and sustainable — social innovations offer a bit of inspiration for those joining the education cause!
Follow the Takachar team (http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/teams/view/234) as they begin research in Nairobi on how improve the sustainability and security of cooking fuel. http://takachar.blogspot.com/view/classic
Follow Diana Jue from Essmart (http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/teams/view/240) as she tests ideas about technology dissemination. http://mitpsc.mit.edu/blog/?page_id=2219
Follow Greg Tao from ALCAS last year (http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/teams/view/213) as he continues his project: http://mitpsc.mit.edu/blog/?page_id=2229
Check out some helpful events happening over IAP (http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/news/view/206):
Pahoehoe: Do-Gooders Behind the Desk – Thu Jan 19, 12-01:30pm, 1-135
RSVP to hynd@mit.edu
Join us to hear from five MIT staff members who are making a difference in communities near and far. You’ll hear about a rowing program for cancer survivors, cell phone technology for detecting hearing loss in Brazil, athletes who are running to end cancer, and more.
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Answers to your Intellectual Property Questions
January 25 – 2:00pm – 3:30pm, 4-153
Starting a new company? Working on a new technology? Looking to learn more about intellectual property? Come join intellectual property attorney Peter Gordon, founder of Patent GC LLC, for an open question and answer session. RSVP to globalchallenge-rsvp@mit.edu with IP in the subject
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Starting Up Your Startup
Thu Jan 26, 03-04:00pm, 3-270
Do you have a brilliant idea but no clue on how to take it to the next level? Our panel discussion of Start-Upswill have speakers at various stages in the Start-Up process from sloppy beginnings to smooth runnings. Preregistration requested through CareerBridge.
Web: http://www.myinterfase.com/mit/student
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(Public) Service Smorgasbord: Eats and Opportunities
Tuesday, January 31 – noon – 1:30pm, W20-491
RSVP to http://bit.ly/ti9Bhx
What type of service do you want to do? Maybe you want to tutor high school students in Cambridge, be paid for public service work with a great organization whoneeds your help, work with a community partner somewhere else in the world, or develop a new solution to deliver impact. We’ll have an open conversation over a smorgasbord of food to share with you the best way to get started on public service or to try something new.
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Design to Scale – Developing Technologies for Global Impact
Thursday, February 2; 3:30 – 5:00pm, at MIT in building 56-114
Working to scale a technology designed for the bottom of the pyramid? Come join for the first of a series of events as we lay the foundation for what to consider when designing for global impact. RSVP to http://bit.ly/vth7Id
Sponsored by D-Lab, IDEAS Global Challenge, International Development Initiative, Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, Public Service Center, SEID.
By any factual account, Ghana is charging into the 21st century. But if you ask a Ghanaian, he or she will say “we have a long way to go and far too many problems.” This critical self-awareness from many Ghanaians is, itself, just one of many signs that the country knows its potential and is striving toward it.
I’m writing from the bustling neighborhood of Osu, nestled in the heart of Ghana’s capital city of Accra. At first glance, one might fixate on the battered assemblies of metal that haphazardly navigate the streets, or the blue-green sewage slime carrying bags and Coke cans out to sea. On the other hand, Osu’s Oxford Street is lined with electronics stores, mom & pop print shops, banks, internet cafés, and restaurants, all teeming with activity from 7am to the wee hours of the night. And most importantly, it is not the “obrunis” (white tourists) that fill this demand, it is Ghanaians.
The numbers are there to support what I’m seeing: according to IMF statistics, Ghana is the world’s fastest growing economy in 2011. The entire West Africa region, in fact, has tracked at around 5% average growth per year for the past decade. In a recent feature article of The Economist, the message is clear: this is not a short-lived burst, this is meaningful change.
However, as my Ghanaian colleagues keep pointing out, many challenges remain. I’ve been doing a deep-dive into the food processing industry in the country. There are countless producers of shea butter, edible oils, dried fruits, and many other food products (for a first glance, check out West Africa Trade Hub’s website). For the most part, these enterprises produce on a small scale, and have trouble expanding their operations. They cite three major obstacles:
1. Getting financing for capital investments
2. Finding high-quality packaging that can compete on the supermarket shelves
3. Government policies which affect industry development
Some mentioned other challenges, including finding well-trained, globally-minded staff, and meeting the stringent requirements of export markets.
However, if one thing has come through clearly during my research, it is that Ghanaians claim full responsibility for meeting these challenges. In the past Ghana, like many African countries, has been heavily dependent on foreign aid; today, as a staff member of a packaging company told me, “if we want to make this happen, if we want to build a successful industry at home, it is not up to America or Europe or Asia to do it. It is up to us.” This mentality is perhaps best reflected in Ghana’s educational achievements. For example, reforms in the 1980s established additional schools, science centers and teacher training colleges, yet there is still record enrollment every year; girls’ enrollment alone increased 8% from 1990 to 2000. It is this growing class of educated Ghanaians that will shape the country’s future.
What does all this mean? It means we owe Ghana and many of its neighbors a big congratulations, and a little more patience. Everyone has growing pains, and at around age 50, these West African nations are still in their youth.
Every month we send out a newsletter on what’s happening in the competition, updates on teams entered into the competition this year and news of alums of the program that are working in the field. If you’d like to sign up for our newsletter, add your email address at: http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/globalchallenge-info. In the meantime, here’s the latest from us.
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Welcome to 2012! And Happy New Year from those of us in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We’re changing up the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge newsletter this year and trying something new.
WHERE WE ARE IN THE COMPETITION CYCLE
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We’re halfway through the academic year at MIT. We have 34 teams entering so far this year. They range from looking at using coconut oil for fuel to developing a new Braille watch. Teams are working to submit their initial drafts of what they propose as solutions – what we call an Initial Scope Statement. They have four opportunities to submit. We match teams up with volunteer reviewers who meet with teams and provide an external perspective on the team’s work. As is true with any idea, the ideas coming into the competition may not resemble those that come out of the competition.
The next chance for teams to submit an Initial Scope Statement is January 25. Keep an eye for more teams signing up!
If you’re around during January, come join us for a workshop: http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/news/view/206
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THE TEAMS
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Meet the 34 teams entering this year: http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/teams
Right now many of the teams are working out in the field – like team Takachar (http://takachar.blogspot.com/view/classic) working in Nairobi to identify how to improve the sustainability and security of cooking fuel and team Essmart working on how to supply corner stores in India with the latest life-improving technologies (http://mitpsc.mit.edu/blog/?page_id=2219).
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GET INVOLVED
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YOU CAN HELP!
Through the IDEAS Global Challenge site, teams request help and individuals offer their help. Come help out! http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/help
ARE YOU A CODER?
We’re looking for a web coder to come join our volunteer force. Come help us create new ways to connect people to IDEAS Global Challenge and the work teams are doing. Is that you? Drop us a note: globalchallenge [at] mit.edu
SPONSOR IDEAS GLOBAL CHALLENGE
Keen to join us in financially supporting the student-led teams working on new solutions for good? We’d love to tell your more about the opportunities to sponsor an award sponsor, an event sponsor and more. Drop Kate a note for more details: kmytty [at] mit.edu
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OTHER RESOURCES
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Meet this year’s teams: http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/teams
We blog at: http://mitpsc.mit.edu/globalchallenge
We share events and deadlines, at MIT and beyond at: bit.ly/tzkMJm
We tweet through @mitchallenge
Email us globalchallenge [at] mit.edu
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