IAP 2011 Seed Grant Teams
The Legatum Center is pleased to announce the recipients of ten IAP 2011 Seed Grants.
Team: Emergency Management Referral
Team Members: Archit Bhise, Shreesh Naik
Geographic Focus: India
Project: Emergency Management Referral (EMR) is designing and piloting a maternal health emergency management system in Mumbai at points where patients can first report to after a complication. Using a proprietary system, patients are directed to the correct hospitals by using a real-time database (based on the number of beds available in each hospital as well as traffic conditions) and are given a risk assessment to gauge their conditions. EMR is also setting up a medical-record system to make sure patients are tracked and their records stored.
Team: Energy Africa
Team Members: Srilata Kammila, Aymeric Sarrazin, Pooya Nikooyeh
Geographic Focus: Tanzania
Project: Energy Africa is a for-profit venture focused on providing access to energy in rural Africa through a community-centric power generation and distributed storage models based on solar power. Key is the ability to deploy power generation stations with a wide range of services, from charging lanterns and mobile phones to battery rentals and related product sales. Energy Africa works in areas with limited or no access to grid and serves communities’ energy needs by engaging and empowering local entrepreneurs and their communities as clients and distributors.
Team: Entier Solutions
Team Members: Daria Kaboli
Geographic Focus: Morocco
Project: With the rapid growth of trade in Morocco, the number of SMEs sourcing agricultural products has grown. However, in a country prone to drought and reliant on agriculture, Morocco’s small farmers (who farm 75% of all farms) are often unreliable sources of produce for meeting international standards. Entier Solutions will fill this gap by working with food production SMEs and farmers to build more economically and socially sustainable supply chains that maximize food production in a region with limited environmental resources and which remains dependent on imports.
Team: KAF Nepal
Team Members: Claudia Espinoza, Maclyn O’Donnell
Geographic Focus: Nepal
Project: The Kanchan Arsenic Filter was developed for the low-cost removal of arsenic from rural drinking water, a problem afflicting thousands of communities. However, a recent study found that the filter performs inadequately in some regions. KAF Nepal will focus on identifying and determining the causes for this. Together with these findings, design recommendations can be made to improve the overall performance of the KAF and ultimately extend its sale and use elsewhere.
Team: La Vaquita 2011
Team Members: Sivakami Sambasivam, Stephanie Lin, Paula Trepman, Samantha Hartzell
Geographic Focus: Mexico
Project: La Vaquita 2011 is undertaking a four-pronged, entrepreneurial-based development initiative in one of Mexico's most remote, marginalized regions. The group is working with a small, rural community and in tandem with several local private- and public-sector partners, to make critical improvements in agriculture, education, healthcare and treatment, and information technologies, primarily through the introduction of microenterprises that speak to each of these target areas. Utilizing locally sourced, low-cost, and replicable "low-end" technologies and supply chain management systems, the group will equip the target community of La Vaquita (and other nearby communities) with sustainable enterprises that community members themselves can scale without the need for external capital to support them at the crucial start-up and first-year stages.
Team: mSurvey II
Team Members: Olivia Bishop, Karin Brandt, Nick Pellegrino, Kenfield Griffith
Geographic Focus: Kenya
Project: mSurvey is a low-cost SMS survey platform specifically designed for development data. It uses an atypical approach to collecting data in impoverished and difficult-to-reach communities, connecting local organizers, governments, NGOs, designers, and researchers to the communities they serve. Clients create multi-question surveys that can be accessed via SMS text messages on mobile phones. mSurvey complements paper-based methods by allowing cost-effective, large-scale, quantitative surveys to be conducted.
Team: Sol Naciente Technologies
Team Members: Kenja Mejia, Danielle Olsen, Coyin Oh
Geographic Focus: Mexico
Project: Sol Naciente Technologies focuses on locally sourced organic materials that can be converted to low-cost water and sanitation technologies that not only serve marginalized rural areas, but which are easily understood by the layman and also can be manufactured and sold in kit or product form on a regional basis by microentrepreneurs. In the process of fabricating these technologies, SNT also transfers their knowledge base, enabling local producers to continue their manufacture without disruption.
Team: Supply Change Paraguay
Team Members: Adah Chan, Erica Dhawan, Shayna Harris
Geographic Focus: Paraguay
Project: Supply Change Paraguay is a start-up venture whose goal is to salvage and use valuable ingredients from wasted fruits and vegetables. In the developing world, often as much as 50% of produce rots due to lack of logistics, storage capacity and processing technologies. SCP aims to develop solar-powered processing technologies to turn produce into useful materials like fruit pulp and dried fruits. With this type of technology, small-scale farmers can be ideally positioned to meet the public’s nutritional needs.
Team: Sustainable Sanitation in Slums
Team Members: Benjamin Moncivaiz II, Ella Peinovich, Nathan Cooke
Geographic Focus: India
Project: Sustainable Sanitation in Slums is developing innovative, low-cost, small-scale, durable toilets that can be installed close to urban homes to increase accessibility, affordability and safety. As part of SSS’s continued product development efforts, new techniques, methods, and design improvements to improve the fabrication process all will lead to a wider deployment of these much-needed devices.
Team: WHEPSA
Team Members: Samantha Marquart, Moya Chin, Soo Mee Lee
Geographic Focus: Senegal
Project: WHEPSA is an educational and entrepreneurial organization based in Kaolack, Senegal that provides tutoring and educational support to more than 3,000 girls in 11 locations. The entrepreneurship program teaches girls who have dropped out of or never attended school artisan trades to provide family income. The program is completely self-sustaining. The WHEPSA team is developing a new marketing and distribution strategy to widen the availability of the program in the region.
