Humanitarian Assistance

Jennifer Moslemi and a team at Habitat Seven in the U.S. will create an interactive children's e-book series for tablet devices that tells personal stories of children whose lives have been touched by aid efforts. Their goal is to cultivate meaningful dialogue within families to spread the message that aid is working.

Jack McPartland of Future Buro in Australia will work to turn the figure "0.7%" - which is the United Nations target for aid donations from the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of developed countries - into a brand that can be communicated to tell the story about the proportionally small amount of financial resources needed to make an impact in the developing world.

Michael Harrison of Deep International Ltd. in Cyprus will develop an online tool that connects children in the developed world with children from developing countries who share their birthday and have benefited from foreign aid. The database of children that have received aid will be filled by aid workers who can promote their agencies' missions and operations, and accessed by kids globally via a child-friendly interactive social site where they can learn more about their "twins" and how their lives were changed by foreign aid.

Robin McQueen of the Truman National Security Institute in the U.S. will work to reframe the concept of foreign aid as effective and essential to national security. A short film trailer will be produced featuring trusted voices of military veterans to explain how aid mitigates crises that can cause global instability. The trailer will be presented with innovative methods of visual and mobile communications to prompt viewers to link to a website for more information. Viewer demographics will be tracked to target groups for further education campaigns.

Daniel Shaw and a team at Wieden+Kennedy New York in the U.S. will develop a digital platform that collects real-time data from devices that measure human activity as it relates to aid - for example the number of times a clean water pump is used or how many vaccine needles are used in an immunization campaign. The project will field-test sensor devices for their ability to track physical action, and a platform will be built to integrate the field data with content that tells the stories of foreign aid progress.

Anne Donohue, Jennifer Beard, and colleagues at Boston University in the U.S. will create and pilot a newsroom staffed by students from the U.S. and Kenya who will receive training in global health issues and journalism. These students will create news stories focusing on successful aid projects, and those judged to have the best news content and dissemination strategies will travel into the field to complete their productions and work on placement of their stories in mainstream media outlets.

Kathryn Kahler Vose of GALEWill Design in the U.S. will create new, simpler messages about the impact of aid that will help the global development community tell compelling stories about their work. These new messages will be disseminated to aid workers via a digital tool to help them translate the complicated language of foreign aid into terms the general public can relate to and understand.

Charlotte Obidairo and team from Coxswain Social Investment plus (CSI+) of Tunisia will develop an open digital platform that uses crowdsourcing to solicit or offer solutions to development challenges from young people around the world. They will repurpose digital platforms such as Facebook and YouTube to present inspiring community-based success stories in multimedia format.

Mark Bashore and his team from Digital Kitchen in the U.S. will create a worldwide radio channel for children aged 8 to provide knowledge, insights and perspectives on aid, and promote connections between the developing and the developed world. By focusing their approach on the young population, they hope in time to transform the "have and have not" concept of aid. The channel will broadcast aid-related first person stories, music, and cultural exchanges. Radio remains the dominant media in the developing world, and radios are cheap and durable.

Caroline Diehl of Media Trust in the United Kingdom and her team will combine its existing television channel with media partnerships and creative young people to produce the first television, online and mobile channel run by young people to disseminate stories on development. A pilot model has been locally tested using established infrastructure and partnerships.