App/Software

Tony Morain of Ogilvy in the U.S. will develop and launch an online platform for university student teams to campaign for their chosen development challenges. The platform will allow the teams to generate a "profile page" and develop a strategy for communicating success with the aid of proven communication tools and access to relevant resources, including case studies of effective communication strategies. Team voting will be used to select a winning campaign to support, which will be provided with funding.

Rastislav Ivanic of Oliver's Planet, Inc. in the U.S. will develop their online platform using SMS to crowd source expertise from the developing world's rural farmers in order to better design and execute agricultural initiatives and promote their funding. The platform will collect simple statements by SMS directly from the farmers without charge on possible solutions to relevant problems, and use them to build feasible and supported solutions. These possible solutions will then be sent back to the farmers for them to rate.

Jamie Lundine and a team from Spatial Collective in Kenya will promote communication between citizens, service providers, local government, and members of the international community, to help improve living conditions in developing countries. They will create an interactive community platform accessible via SMS for citizens to present local development challenges, such as water supply shortages, and suggest possible solutions. Service providers and potential donors can then use the multi-media platform to identify these needs, and develop and evaluate solutions.

Christoph Nann, Alex Schill, Maik Kaehler and a team from Serviceplan in Germany will test a simple and modern method for generating donations to developing countries. They will use location-based network applications such as Foursquare, which has over 25 million users who record their locations in cafés, shops and restaurants. By setting up collaborations with local retail partners in Germany, they will label their stores on Foursquare with charity projects in developing countries, such as building water pumps, to promote visitors to the stores.

Steff Deprez of Vredeseilanden in Belgium will develop an approach utilizing pattern detection software (SenseMaker) to translate feedback from smallholder farmers directly into quantitative data that can be easily queried by agricultural development program managers and evaluators. They will test their approach on rice, passion fruit and coffee smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan African to evaluate whether they should be included in modern markets.

Lesley Drake of Imperial College London in the United Kingdom will develop a mobile phone-based platform to increase the participation of smallholder farmers in the Kenyan government's homegrown school meals program. The technology will enable schools to report their food requirements, and the Ministry to advertise tenders to registered sellers including smallholder farmers, all via mobile phone. This approach will lower the cost of making school feeding contracts and make the process transparent, as well as providing a new market for local farmers.

Adam Abramson from Foundations for Farming in Zimbabwe will develop a low-cost mobile phone platform to encourage local farmers to directly engage with each other and with local organizations to share their experiences and provide feedback. The platform is installed on feature phones and allows the formation of 'buddy' chat groups. They will further develop the software, and evaluate its ability to promote the adoption of a novel farming technique by conducting a randomized controlled trial in 72 sites across Zimbabwe.

Blanca Jimenez Cisneros of Mexican Autonomous National University in Mexico will develop software to automatically identify and quantify parasitic helminth eggs in wastewater. The software could provide a rapid and low-cost method for untrained personnel to test wastewater before its reuse in agriculture, thereby reducing parasitic infections in local populations.

Marc Mitchell of D-tree International in the U.S. will develop and test a mobile phone-based tool using clinical algorithms that rapidly identify women at risk during labor and delivery and facilitate emergency transfer to a hospital. The tool is a combination of phone decision support, data storage, on-line banking, and communications on a single device at the point of care, and it could significantly reduce maternal mortality in low-income countries.

Paul Blumenthal of Stanford University in the U.S. is creating a cell phone application that collects information on an individual's menstrual cycle, processes the information with a calendar algorithm, and sends free text messages as a reminder to a woman of her menstrual status.