Infrastructure

Nirat Bhatnagar of the Belongg Community Ventures Private Ltd. in India, in collaboration with colleagues at ARTPARK also in India, will develop a Large Language Model (LLM)-based tool to enable development practitioners, funders, and researchers to adopt more equitable approaches, particularly addressing the intersections of marginalization. They will assemble a comprehensive and trusted corpus of development research papers, reports, and media articles and use it to build a user-friendly website and a backend ChatGPT 4.0 API-based LLM model.

Rachel Chikwamba of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa together with Kerry Love of Sunflower Therapeutics in the U.S. will establish local manufacturing capacity in South Africa to increase access to protein-based biologic drugs including antibodies and vaccines, which are used for treating many different diseases. Access to biologics is unevenly distributed across the globe, and the conventional manufacturing practices are expensive and require substantial physical space and operational know-how.

ECD is universally recommended in 2030 SDGs. In India, Anganwadi centers are responsible for providing ECD care with supplementary nutrition, preschool education, health education, and referral services.

Marginalized and disempowered Indigenous communities continue to face threats to their land. This technology is a powerful tool to protect territories and strengthen claims. Although Indigenous peoples have the formal right to free, prior, and informed consent to projects in their territories, it can be difficult to adequately monitor activities in their territories.

We are based in Skidegate, a remote community of 1,000 Haida citizens. Our community hosts many inspiring projects related to Haida language, food security, and climate justice. Though we are engaged in rich cultural revitalization, our community narrative is largely controlled by outsiders. People who are not aware of Haida protocol may misrepresent or appropriate something in their film, and many of our local stories are left unshared.

Climate change and poor gender diversity in the green building industry are jointly addressed in this hands-on, scalable project. Buildings account for more than one-quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), according to the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction. Greening our built environment helps fight climate change, while building resilience into communities. A shift to green technologies and “green jobs” requires a dynamic and highly skilled labor force.

A decade-long militant insurgency; many military operations in the northwest and natural disasters have displaced 5.3 millions of people from their homes in Pakistan. Mass exodus due to conflicts and insecurity have made it impossible for the displaced persons to attain basic health care. While on the other hand; 77% of the female doctors discontinue medical practice once they get married. Hence, health services, though available in the area, are already overstretched before the IDPs’ arrival.

We seek to address the availability of clean water and electricity in medical facilities in rural, off-grid and stressed populations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Many Congolese hospitals function without sources of potable water and without electricity. Conflict exacerbates the situation, limiting supply chains and infrastructure maintenance. Our innovation addresses the development of renewable off-grid potable water and electricity resources at community medical centers.

Nicki Tiffin, Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, will build an online platform – the African Data and Biospecimen Exchange – to facilitate equitable, ethical, and transparent data and biospecimen sharing on the continent, and promote research collaborations to improve health. Sharing biospecimens and data such as human genomics and pathogen sequencing data for use by other scientists is critical to sustain research in Africa.

Fidele Ntie-Kang, a computational chemist at the Department of Chemistry, University of Buea in Cameroon, will establish a state-of-the-art drug discovery regional center for Central Africa that utilizes natural products from across the continent to identify new antiviral drugs suitable for resource-limited regions. Dr. Ntie-Kang is a pioneer in harnessing the diverse African flora for drug discovery purposes. His research group is building an online natural products database, which contains compounds isolated from plants, fungi, corals and bacterial species growing in Africa.