Product/Service Development

Patrice Martin of IDEO.org in the U.S. and Devi Prasad Rao from the Arohana Seva Foundation in India will design and prototype a microfranchise system to rent small and mid-sized time-saving agricultural implements for Indian women smallholder farmers to improve their productivity and incomes. The system will be tailored to meet the unique needs of women smallholder farmers, and incorporate financing, training, and equipment maintenance.

Rohini Pande of Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government in the U.S. and colleagues Simone Schaner, Erica Field, Natalia Rigol, and Charity Troyer-Moore will use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to capture information on the financial access and practices of the rural poor in Madhya Pradesh, India. The system will also enable these people to interact with the formal financial system and receive government benefits.

Iris Braun of IFMR LEAD in India will expand access to microloans for the poor in Bangladesh by piloting a simple credit-scoring test for rating individuals. Poor households are often in need of small, short-term loans to buffer fluctuations in income, but formally accessing these loans is problematic as most people have no credit score, and/or are unable to complete the application process.

Rupert Scofield from FINCA International, Inc. in the U.S. will promote financial inclusion in the Democratic Republic of Congo by partnering with First Access and mobile network operators to build a credit-scoring model for individuals based on mobile phone usage and financial data. The aim is to provide financial services and develop new products for the unbanked majority.

Johnathan Dalzell of Queen's University Belfast in the United Kingdom will improve food crop productivity particularly for small hold subsistence farmers by reducing the losses caused by pathogenic nematode worms, which are estimated to cost around $125 billion per year globally. These pathogenic worms absorb small proteins called neuropeptides from their external environment directly into their central nervous system, which can influence their movement and sensory behavior. They will exploit this process to destroy the worms.

Gregorio Hueros of Universidad de Alcala in Spain will engineer maize kernels to increase the expression of anti-fungal genes in the transfer cell layer, which transports nutrients and protects filial tissues in the adjacent growing seeds. This could boost the ability of these cells to protect the grain against invasion by pathogens such as mycotoxin-producing fungi.

Steven Kelly of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom proposes to genetically engineer a benign parasite as a biological control mechanism against herbivorous insect pests. When extracted from a cassava leaf by a feeding insect pest, the parasite expresses the insecticide and thus acts to control pest levels. This biological control agent would target only the insect pests, and could require only a one-time distribution, an important consideration in developing countries.

Simon Krattinger of CSIRO Plant Industry in Australia, along with Beat Keller and Evans Lagudah of the University of Zurich, seek to generate transgenic rice and sorghum that are resistant to specific pathogenic fungi by introducing a known disease resistance gene, Lr34, from wheat.

Aymeric Goyer of Oregon State University and Pamela Ronald of the University of California, Davis in the U.S. will develop rice plants that accumulate higher levels of thiamine (vitamin B1) to test the theory that boosting thiamine enhances the plant's resistance to disease. This strategy could lead to crops that can not only resist two devastating pathogens, Xanthomonas oryzae and Magnaporthe grisea, and lead to higher yields, but also produce rice of higher nutritional value.

Charles Spillane, Paul Wagtaff, and Una Murray of the National University of Ireland, Galway, in Ireland will lead a team in working to enable women smallholder farmers in Tanzania to design and develop their own labor-saving agricultural tools. They will work with six women farmer groups to identify agricultural and food processing tasks that require the highest labor demands, and assist them with designing improved tools. The top designs will then be scanned with a 3D camera and printed as plastic prototypes using low-cost printers.